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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1138 ***
+
+THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+(1915)
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     THE PRELUDE
+
+           ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+
+
+     THE STORY
+
+       I.  THE BOY GROWS UP
+
+      II.  THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN
+
+     III.  AMANDA
+
+      IV.  THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON
+
+       V.  THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY
+
+      VI.  THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+
+
+
+
+THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+
+
+
+
+THE PRELUDE
+
+
+
+
+ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+
+
+
+1
+
+The story of William Porphyry Benham is the story of a man who was led
+into adventure by an idea. It was an idea that took possession of his
+imagination quite early in life, it grew with him and changed with him,
+it interwove at last completely with his being. His story is its story.
+It was traceably germinating in the schoolboy; it was manifestly present
+in his mind at the very last moment of his adventurous life. He belonged
+to that fortunate minority who are independent of daily necessities, so
+that he was free to go about the world under its direction. It led him
+far. It led him into situations that bordered upon the fantastic, it
+made him ridiculous, it came near to making him sublime. And this idea
+of his was of such a nature that in several aspects he could document
+it. Its logic forced him to introspection and to the making of a record.
+
+An idea that can play so large a part in a life must necessarily have
+something of the complication and protean quality of life itself. It is
+not to be stated justly in any formula, it is not to be rendered by an
+epigram. As well one might show a man's skeleton for his portrait. Yet,
+essentially, Benham's idea was simple. He had an incurable, an almost
+innate persuasion that he had to live life nobly and thoroughly. His
+commoner expression for that thorough living is “the aristocratic life.”
+ But by “aristocratic” he meant something very different from the
+quality of a Russian prince, let us say, or an English peer. He meant an
+intensity, a clearness.... Nobility for him was to get something out of
+his individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a splendour--it is a thing
+easier to understand than to say.
+
+One might hesitate to call this idea “innate,” and yet it comes soon
+into a life when it comes at all. In Benham's case we might trace it
+back to the Day Nursery at Seagate, we might detect it stirring already
+at the petticoat stage, in various private struttings and valiant
+dreamings with a helmet of pasteboard and a white-metal sword. We have
+most of us been at least as far as that with Benham. And we have
+died like Horatius, slaying our thousands for our country, or we have
+perished at the stake or faced the levelled muskets of the firing
+party--“No, do not bandage my eyes”--because we would not betray the
+secret path that meant destruction to our city. But with Benham the
+vein was stronger, and it increased instead of fading out as he grew
+to manhood. It was less obscured by those earthy acquiescences, those
+discretions, that saving sense of proportion, which have made most of
+us so satisfactorily what we are. “Porphyry,” his mother had discovered
+before he was seventeen, “is an excellent boy, a brilliant boy, but, I
+begin to see, just a little unbalanced.”
+
+The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the story of him, is that.
+
+Most of us are--balanced; in spite of occasional reveries we do come to
+terms with the limitations of life, with those desires and dreams and
+discretions that, to say the least of it, qualify our nobility, we take
+refuge in our sense of humour and congratulate ourselves on a certain
+amiable freedom from priggishness or presumption, but for Benham that
+easy declension to a humorous acceptance of life as it is did not occur.
+He found his limitations soon enough; he was perpetually
+rediscovering them, but out of these interments of the spirit he rose
+again--remarkably. When we others have decided that, to be plain about
+it, we are not going to lead the noble life at all, that the thing is
+too ambitious and expensive even to attempt, we have done so because
+there were other conceptions of existence that were good enough for us,
+we decided that instead of that glorious impossible being of ourselves,
+we would figure in our own eyes as jolly fellows, or sly dogs, or sane,
+sound, capable men or brilliant successes, and so forth--practicable
+things. For Benham, exceptionally, there were not these practicable
+things. He blundered, he fell short of himself, he had--as you will
+be told--some astonishing rebuffs, but they never turned him aside for
+long. He went by nature for this preposterous idea of nobility as a
+linnet hatched in a cage will try to fly.
+
+And when he discovered--and in this he was assisted not a little by his
+friend at his elbow--when he discovered that Nobility was not the simple
+thing he had at first supposed it to be, he set himself in a mood only
+slightly disconcerted to the discovery of Nobility. When it dawned upon
+him, as it did, that one cannot be noble, so to speak, IN VACUO, he set
+himself to discover a Noble Society. He began with simple beliefs and
+fine attitudes and ended in a conscious research. If he could not get
+through by a stride, then it followed that he must get through by a
+climb. He spent the greater part of his life studying and experimenting
+in the noble possibilities of man. He never lost his absurd faith in
+that conceivable splendour. At first it was always just round the corner
+or just through the wood; to the last it seemed still but a little way
+beyond the distant mountains.
+
+For this reason this story has been called THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. It
+was a real research, it was documented. In the rooms in Westhaven Street
+that at last were as much as one could call his home, he had accumulated
+material for--one hesitates to call it a book--let us say it was an
+analysis of, a guide to the noble life. There after his tragic death
+came his old friend White, the journalist and novelist, under a promise,
+and found these papers; he found them to the extent of a crammed
+bureau, half a score of patent files quite distended and a writing-table
+drawer-full, and he was greatly exercised to find them. They were,
+White declares, they are still after much experienced handling, an
+indigestible aggregation. On this point White is very assured. When
+Benham thought he was gathering together a book he was dreaming, White
+says. There is no book in it....
+
+Perhaps too, one might hazard, Benham was dreaming when he thought the
+noble life a human possibility. Perhaps man, like the ape and the hyaena
+and the tapeworm and many other of God's necessary but less attractive
+creatures, is not for such exalted ends. That doubt never seems to have
+got a lodgment in Benham's skull; though at times one might suppose it
+the basis of White's thought. You will find in all Benham's story,
+if only it can be properly told, now subdued, now loud and amazed and
+distressed, but always traceable, this startled, protesting question,
+“BUT WHY THE DEVIL AREN'T WE?” As though necessarily we ought to be.
+He never faltered in his persuasion that behind the dingy face of this
+world, the earthy stubbornness, the baseness and dulness of himself
+and all of us, lurked the living jewels of heaven, the light of glory,
+things unspeakable. At first it seemed to him that one had only just to
+hammer and will, and at the end, after a life of willing and hammering,
+he was still convinced there was something, something in the nature of
+an Open Sesame, perhaps a little more intricate than one had supposed
+at first, a little more difficult to secure, but still in that nature,
+which would suddenly roll open for mankind the magic cave of the
+universe, that precious cave at the heart of all things, in which one
+must believe.
+
+And then life--life would be the wonder it so perplexingly just
+isn't....
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Benham did not go about the world telling people of this consuming
+research. He was not the prophet or preacher of his idea. It was too
+living and intricate and uncertain a part of him to speak freely about.
+It was his secret self; to expose it casually would have shamed him. He
+drew all sorts of reserves about him, he wore his manifest imperfections
+turned up about him like an overcoat in bitter wind. He was content
+to be inexplicable. His thoughts led him to the conviction that this
+magnificent research could not be, any more than any other research
+can be, a solitary enterprise, but he delayed expression; in a mighty
+writing and stowing away of these papers he found a relief from the
+unpleasant urgency to confess and explain himself prematurely. So that
+White, though he knew Benham with the intimacy of an old schoolfellow
+who had renewed his friendship, and had shared his last days and been a
+witness of his death, read the sheets of manuscript often with surprise
+and with a sense of added elucidation.
+
+And, being also a trained maker of books, White as he read was more
+and more distressed that an accumulation so interesting should be so
+entirely unshaped for publication. “But this will never make a book,”
+ said White with a note of personal grievance. His hasty promise in their
+last moments together had bound him, it seemed, to a task he now found
+impossible. He would have to work upon it tremendously; and even then he
+did not see how it could be done.
+
+This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a
+confession, not a diary. It was--nothing definable. It went into no
+conceivable covers. It was just, White decided, a proliferation. A vast
+proliferation. It wanted even a title. There were signs that Benham had
+intended to call it THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE, and that he had tried at some
+other time the title of AN ESSAY ON ARISTOCRACY. Moreover, it would
+seem that towards the end he had been disposed to drop the word
+“aristocratic” altogether, and adopt some such phrase as THE LARGER
+LIFE. Once it was LIFE SET FREE. He had fallen away more and more from
+nearly everything that one associates with aristocracy--at the end only
+its ideals of fearlessness and generosity remained.
+
+Of all these titles THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE seemed at first most like
+a clue to White. Benham's erratic movements, his sudden impulses, his
+angers, his unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange places, and
+his lapses into what had seemed to be pure adventurousness, could all be
+put into system with that. Before White had turned over three pages of
+the great fascicle of manuscript that was called Book Two, he had found
+the word “Bushido” written with a particularly flourishing capital
+letter and twice repeated. “That was inevitable,” said White with the
+comforting regret one feels for a friend's banalities. “And it dates...
+[unreadable] this was early....”
+
+“Modern aristocracy, the new aristocracy,” he read presently, “has still
+to be discovered and understood. This is the necessary next step for
+mankind. As far as possible I will discover and understand it, and as
+far as I know it I will be it. This is the essential disposition of my
+mind. God knows I have appetites and sloths and habits and blindnesses,
+but so far as it is in my power to release myself I will escape to
+this....”
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+White sat far into the night and for several nights turning over papers
+and rummaging in untidy drawers. Memories came back to him of his dead
+friend and pieced themselves together with other memories and joined
+on to scraps in this writing. Bold yet convincing guesses began to leap
+across the gaps. A story shaped itself....
+
+The story began with the schoolfellow he had known at Minchinghampton
+School.
+
+Benham had come up from his father's preparatory school at Seagate. He
+had been a boy reserved rather than florid in his acts and manners, a
+boy with a pale face, incorrigible hair and brown eyes that went dark
+and deep with excitement. Several times White had seen him excited, and
+when he was excited Benham was capable of tensely daring things. On one
+occasion he had insisted upon walking across a field in which was an
+aggressive bull. It had been put there to prevent the boys taking
+a short cut to the swimming place. It had bellowed tremendously and
+finally charged him. He had dodged it and got away; at the time it had
+seemed an immense feat to White and the others who were safely up
+the field. He had walked to the fence, risking a second charge by his
+deliberation. Then he had sat on the fence and declared his intention
+of always crossing the field so long as the bull remained there. He had
+said this with white intensity, he had stopped abruptly in mid-sentence,
+and then suddenly he had dropped to the ground, clutched the fence,
+struggled with heaving shoulders, and been sick.
+
+The combination of apparently stout heart and manifestly weak stomach
+had exercised the Minchinghampton intelligence profoundly.
+
+On one or two other occasions Benham had shown courage of the same
+rather screwed-up sort. He showed it not only in physical but in mental
+things. A boy named Prothero set a fashion of religious discussion
+in the school, and Benham, after some self-examination, professed an
+atheistical republicanism rather in the manner of Shelley. This brought
+him into open conflict with Roddles, the History Master. Roddles had
+discovered these theological controversies in some mysterious way, and
+he took upon himself to talk at Benham and Prothero. He treated them to
+the common misapplication of that fool who “hath said in his heart there
+is no God.” He did not perceive there was any difference between the
+fool who says a thing in his heart and one who says it in the dormitory.
+He revived that delectable anecdote of the Eton boy who professed
+disbelief and was at once “soundly flogged” by his head master. “Years
+afterwards that boy came back to thank ----”
+
+“Gurr,” said Prothero softly. “STEW--ard!”
+
+“Your turn next, Benham,” whispered an orthodox controversialist.
+
+“Good Lord! I'd like to see him,” said Benham with a forced loudness
+that could scarcely be ignored.
+
+The subsequent controversy led to an interview with the head. From
+it Benham emerged more whitely strung up than ever. “He said he would
+certainly swish me if I deserved it, and I said I would certainly kill
+him if he did.”
+
+“And then?”
+
+“He told me to go away and think it over. Said he would preach about
+it next Sunday.... Well, a swishing isn't a likely thing anyhow. But
+I would.... There isn't a master here I'd stand a thrashing from--not
+one.... And because I choose to say what I think!... I'd run amuck.”
+
+For a week or so the school was exhilarated by a vain and ill-concealed
+hope that the head might try it just to see if Benham would. It was
+tantalizingly within the bounds of possibility....
+
+These incidents came back to White's mind as he turned over the
+newspapers in the upper drawer of the bureau. The drawer was labelled
+“Fear--the First Limitation,” and the material in it was evidently
+designed for the opening volume of the great unfinished book. Indeed, a
+portion of it was already arranged and written up.
+
+As White read through this manuscript he was reminded of a score of
+schoolboy discussions Benham and he and Prothero had had together. Here
+was the same old toughness of mind, a kind of intellectual hardihood,
+that had sometimes shocked his schoolfellows. Benham had been one of
+those boys who do not originate ideas very freely, but who go out to
+them with a fierce sincerity. He believed and disbelieved with emphasis.
+Prothero had first set him doubting, but it was Benham's own temperament
+took him on to denial. His youthful atheism had been a matter for secret
+consternation in White. White did not believe very much in God even
+then, but this positive disbelieving frightened him. It was going
+too far. There had been a terrible moment in the dormitory, during a
+thunderstorm, a thunderstorm so vehement that it had awakened them
+all, when Latham, the humourist and a quietly devout boy, had suddenly
+challenged Benham to deny his Maker.
+
+“NOW say you don't believe in God?”
+
+Benham sat up in bed and repeated his negative faith, while little
+Hopkins, the Bishop's son, being less certain about the accuracy of
+Providence than His aim, edged as far as he could away from Benham's
+cubicle and rolled his head in his bedclothes.
+
+“And anyhow,” said Benham, when it was clear that he was not to be
+struck dead forthwith, “you show a poor idea of your God to think he'd
+kill a schoolboy for honest doubt. Even old Roddles--”
+
+“I can't listen to you,” cried Latham the humourist, “I can't listen to
+you. It's--HORRIBLE.”
+
+“Well, who began it?” asked Benham.
+
+A flash of lightning lit the dormitory and showed him to White
+white-faced and ablaze with excitement, sitting up with the bed-clothes
+about him. “Oh WOW!” wailed the muffled voice of little Hopkins as the
+thunder burst like a giant pistol overhead, and he buried his head still
+deeper in the bedclothes and gave way to unappeasable grief.
+
+Latham's voice came out of the darkness. “This ATHEISM that you and
+Billy Prothero have brought into the school--”
+
+He started violently at another vivid flash, and every one remained
+silent, waiting for the thunder....
+
+But White remembered no more of the controversy because he had made a
+frightful discovery that filled and blocked his mind. Every time the
+lightning flashed, there was a red light in Benham's eyes....
+
+It was only three days after when Prothero discovered exactly the same
+phenomenon in the School House boothole and talked of cats and cattle,
+that White's confidence in their friend was partially restored....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+“Fear, the First Limitation”--his title indicated the spirit of Benham's
+opening book very clearly. His struggle with fear was the very beginning
+of his soul's history. It continued to the end. He had hardly decided to
+lead the noble life before he came bump against the fact that he was
+a physical coward. He felt fear acutely. “Fear,” he wrote, “is the
+foremost and most persistent of the shepherding powers that keep us
+in the safe fold, that drive us back to the beaten track and comfort
+and--futility. The beginning of all aristocracy is the subjugation of
+fear.”
+
+At first the struggle was so great that he hated fear without any
+qualification; he wanted to abolish it altogether.
+
+“When I was a boy,” he writes, “I thought I would conquer fear for good
+and all, and never more be troubled by it. But it is not to be done in
+that way. One might as well dream of having dinner for the rest of one's
+life. Each time and always I have found that it has to be conquered
+afresh. To this day I fear, little things as well as big things. I have
+to grapple with some little dread every day--urge myself.... Just as
+I have to wash and shave myself every day.... I believe it is so with
+every one, but it is difficult to be sure; few men who go into dangers
+care very much to talk about fear....”
+
+Later Benham found some excuses for fear, came even to dealings with
+fear. He never, however, admits that this universal instinct is any
+better than a kindly but unintelligent nurse from whose fostering
+restraints it is man's duty to escape. Discretion, he declared, must
+remain; a sense of proportion, an “adequacy of enterprise,” but the
+discretion of an aristocrat is in his head, a tactical detail, it has
+nothing to do with this visceral sinking, this ebb in the nerves. “From
+top to bottom, the whole spectrum of fear is bad, from panic fear at
+one extremity down to that mere disinclination for enterprise, that
+reluctance and indolence which is its lowest phase. These are things of
+the beast, these are for creatures that have a settled environment, a
+life history, that spin in a cage of instincts. But man is a beast of
+that kind no longer, he has left his habitat, he goes out to limitless
+living....”
+
+This idea of man going out into new things, leaving securities, habits,
+customs, leaving his normal life altogether behind him, underlay all
+Benham's aristocratic conceptions. And it was natural that he
+should consider fear as entirely inconvenient, treat it indeed with
+ingratitude, and dwell upon the immense liberations that lie beyond for
+those who will force themselves through its remonstrances....
+
+Benham confessed his liability to fear quite freely in these notes. His
+fear of animals was ineradicable. He had had an overwhelming dread of
+bears until he was twelve or thirteen, the child's irrational dread
+of impossible bears, bears lurking under the bed and in the evening
+shadows. He confesses that even up to manhood he could not cross a
+field containing cattle without keeping a wary eye upon them--his bull
+adventure rather increased than diminished that disposition--he hated a
+strange dog at his heels and would manoeuvre himself as soon as possible
+out of reach of the teeth or heels of a horse. But the peculiar dread of
+his childhood was tigers. Some gaping nursemaid confronted him suddenly
+with a tiger in a cage in the menagerie annexe of a circus. “My small
+mind was overwhelmed.”
+
+“I had never thought,” White read, “that a tiger was much larger than
+a St. Bernard dog.... This great creature!... I could not believe any
+hunter would attack such a monster except by stealth and with weapons of
+enormous power....
+
+“He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and
+looked over my head with yellow eyes--at some phantom far away. Every
+now and then he snarled. The contempt of his detestable indifference
+sank deeper and deeper into my soul. I knew that were the cage to vanish
+I should stand there motionless, his helpless prey. I knew that were he
+at large in the same building with me I should be too terror-stricken
+to escape him. At the foot of a ladder leading clear to escape I should
+have awaited him paralyzed. At last I gripped my nurse's hand. 'Take me
+away,' I whispered.
+
+“In my dreams that night he stalked me. I made my frozen flight from
+him, I slammed a door on him, and he thrust his paw through a panel
+as though it had been paper and clawed for me. The paw got longer and
+longer....
+
+“I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.
+
+“I remember that he took me in his arms.
+
+“'It's only a big sort of pussy, Poff,' he said. 'FELIS TIGRIS. FELIS,
+you know, means cat.'
+
+“But I knew better. I was in no mood then for my father's insatiable
+pedagoguery.
+
+“'And my little son mustn't be a coward.'...
+
+“After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers alone.
+
+“For years the thought of that tiger's immensity haunted my mind. In
+my dreams I cowered before it a thousand times; in the dusk it rarely
+failed me. On the landing on my way to bed there was a patch of darkness
+beyond a chest that became a lurking horror for me, and sometimes the
+door of my father's bedroom would stand open and there was a long buff
+and crimson-striped shape, by day indeed an ottoman, but by night--.
+Could an ottoman crouch and stir in the flicker of a passing candle?
+Could an ottoman come after you noiselessly, and so close that you could
+not even turn round upon it? No!”
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+When Benham was already seventeen and, as he supposed, hardened against
+his fear of beasts, his friend Prothero gave him an account of the
+killing of an old labouring man by a stallion which had escaped out of
+its stable. The beast had careered across a field, leapt a hedge and
+come upon its victim suddenly. He had run a few paces and stopped,
+trying to defend his head with the horse rearing over him. It beat him
+down with two swift blows of its fore hoofs, one, two, lifted him up in
+its long yellow teeth and worried him as a terrier does a rat--the poor
+old wretch was still able to make a bleating sound at that--dropped him,
+trampled and kicked him as he tried to crawl away, and went on trampling
+and battering him until he was no more than a bloody inhuman bundle of
+clothes and mire. For more than half an hour this continued, and then
+its animal rage was exhausted and it desisted, and went and grazed at
+a little distance from this misshapen, hoof-marked, torn, and muddy
+remnant of a man. No one it seems but a horror-stricken child knew what
+was happening....
+
+This picture of human indignity tortured Benham's imagination much more
+than it tortured the teller of the tale. It filled him with shame and
+horror. For three or four years every detail of that circumstantial
+narrative seemed unforgettable. A little lapse from perfect health and
+the obsession returned. He could not endure the neighing of horses: when
+he saw horses galloping in a field with him his heart stood still. And
+all his life thereafter he hated horses.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+A different sort of fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due to a
+certain clumsiness and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable places.
+There he was more definitely balanced between the hopelessly rash and
+the pitifully discreet.
+
+He had written an account of a private struggle between himself and a
+certain path of planks and rock edges called the Bisse of Leysin. This
+happened in his adolescence. He had had a bad attack of influenza and
+his doctor had sent him to a little hotel--the only hotel it was in
+those days--at Montana in Valais. There, later, when he had picked up
+his strength, his father was to join him and take him mountaineering,
+that second-rate mountaineering which is so dear to dons and
+schoolmasters. When the time came he was ready for that, but he had had
+his experiences. He had gone through a phase of real cowardice. He was
+afraid, he confessed, before even he reached Montana; he was afraid of
+the steepness of the mountains. He had to drive ten or twelve miles
+up and up the mountain-side, a road of innumerable hairpin bends and
+precipitous banks, the horse was gaunt and ugly with a disposition to
+shy, and he confesses he clutched the side of the vehicle and speculated
+how he should jump if presently the whole turnout went tumbling over....
+
+“And afterwards I dreamt dreams of precipices. I made strides over
+precipices, I fell and fell with a floating swiftness towards remote
+valleys, I was assailed by eagles upon a perilous ledge that crumbled
+away and left me clinging by my nails to nothing.”
+
+The Bisse of Leysin is one of those artificial water-courses which bring
+water from some distant source to pastures that have an insufficient
+or uncertain supply. It is a little better known than most because of
+a certain exceptional boldness in its construction; for a distance of a
+few score yards it runs supported by iron staples across the front of
+a sheer precipice, and for perhaps half a mile it hangs like an eyebrow
+over nearly or quite vertical walls of pine-set rock. Beside it, on
+the outer side of it, runs a path, which becomes an offhand gangway
+of planking at the overhanging places. At one corner, which gives the
+favourite picture postcard from Montana, the rocks project so sharply
+above the water that the passenger on the gangway must crouch down upon
+the bending plank as he walks. There is no hand-hold at all.
+
+A path from Montana takes one over a pine-clad spur and down a
+precipitous zig-zag upon the middle of the Bisse, and thither Benham
+came, fascinated by the very fact that here was something of which the
+mere report frightened him. He had to walk across the cold clear rush
+of the Bisse upon a pine log, and then he found himself upon one of the
+gentler interludes of the Bisse track. It was a scrambling path nearly
+two feet wide, and below it were slopes, but not so steep as to terrify.
+At a vast distance below he saw through tree-stems and blue haze a
+twisted strand of bright whiteness, the river that joins the Rhone at
+Sion. It looped about and passed out of sight remotely beneath his feet.
+He turned to the right, and came to a corner that overhung a precipice.
+He craned his head round this corner and saw the evil place of the
+picture-postcards.
+
+He remained for a long time trying to screw himself up to walk along the
+jagged six-inch edge of rock between cliff and torrent into which the
+path has shrunken, to the sagging plank under the overhanging rock
+beyond.
+
+He could not bring himself to do that.
+
+“It happened that close to the corner a large lump of rock and earth
+was breaking away, a cleft was opening, so that presently, it seemed
+possible at any moment, the mass would fall headlong into the blue deeps
+below. This impending avalanche was not in my path along the Bisse, it
+was no sort of danger to me, but in some way its insecurity gave a final
+touch to my cowardice. I could not get myself round that corner.”
+
+He turned away. He went and examined the planks in the other direction,
+and these he found less forbidding. He crossed one precipitous place,
+with a fall of twoscore feet or less beneath him, and found worse ahead.
+There also he managed. A third place was still more disagreeable.
+The plank was worn and thin, and sagged under him. He went along it
+supporting himself against the rock above the Bisse with an extended
+hand. Halfway the rock fell back, so that there was nothing whatever
+to hold. He stopped, hesitating whether he should go back--but on
+this plank there was no going back because no turning round seemed
+practicable. While he was still hesitating there came a helpful
+intervention. Behind him he saw a peasant appearing and disappearing
+behind trees and projecting rock masses, and coming across the previous
+plank at a vigorous trot....
+
+Under the stimulus of a spectator Benham got to the end of this third
+place without much trouble. Then very politely he stood aside for the
+expert to go ahead so that he could follow at his own pace.
+
+There were, however, more difficulties yet to come, and a disagreeable
+humiliation. That confounded peasant developed a parental solicitude.
+After each crossing he waited, and presently began to offer advice and
+encouragement. At last came a place where everything was overhanging,
+where the Bisse was leaking, and the plank wet and slippery. The water
+ran out of the leak near the brim of the wooden channel and fell in a
+long shivering thread of silver. THERE WAS NO SOUND OF ITS FALL. It just
+fell--into a void. Benham wished he had not noted that. He groaned, but
+faced the plank; he knew this would be the slowest affair of all.
+
+The peasant surveyed him from the further side.
+
+“Don't be afraid!” cried the peasant in his clumsy Valaisian French,
+and returned, returning along the plank that seemed quite sufficiently
+loaded without him, extending a charitable hand.
+
+“Damn!” whispered Benham, but he took the hand.
+
+Afterwards, rather ignobly, he tried to explain in his public-school
+French. “Pas de peur,” he said. “Pas de peur. Mais la tete, n'a pas
+l'habitude.”
+
+The peasant, failing to understand, assured him again that there was no
+danger.
+
+(“Damn!”)
+
+Benham was led over all the other planks, he was led as if he was an
+old lady crossing a glacier. He was led into absolute safety, and
+shamefacedly he rewarded his guide. Then he went a little way and sat
+down, swore softly, and watched the honest man go striding and plunging
+down towards Lens until he was out of sight.
+
+“Now,” said Benham to himself, “if I do not go back along the planks my
+secret honour is gone for ever.”
+
+He told himself that he had not a good head, that he was not well, that
+the sun was setting and the light no longer good, that he had a very
+good chance indeed of getting killed. Then it came to him suddenly as a
+clear and simple truth, as something luminously plain, that it is better
+to get killed than go away defeated by such fears and unsteadiness as
+his. The change came into his mind as if a white light were suddenly
+turned on--where there had been nothing but shadows and darkness. He
+rose to his feet and went swiftly and intently the whole way back, going
+with a kind of temperate recklessness, and, because he was no longer
+careful, easily. He went on beyond his starting place toward the corner,
+and did that supreme bit, to and fro, that bit where the lump was
+falling away, and he had to crouch, as gaily as the rest. Then he
+recrossed the Bisse upon the pine log, clambered up through the pines to
+the crest, and returned through the meadows to his own hotel.
+
+After that he should have slept the sleep of contentment, but instead
+he had quite dreadful nightmares, of hanging in frozen fear above
+incredible declivities, of ill-aimed leaps across chasms to slippery
+footholds, of planks that swayed and broke suddenly in the middle and
+headed him down and down....
+
+The next day in the sunshine he walked the Bisse again with those dreams
+like trailing mists in his mind, and by comparison the path of the Bisse
+was nothing, it was like walking along a kerbstone, it was an exercise
+for young ladies....
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+In his younger days Benham had regarded Fear as a shameful secret and as
+a thing to be got rid of altogether. It seemed to him that to feel fear
+was to fall short of aristocracy, and in spite of the deep dreads
+and disgusts that haunted his mind, he set about the business of its
+subjugation as if it were a spiritual amputation. But as he emerged
+from the egotism of adolescence he came to realize that this was
+too comprehensive an operation; every one feels fear, and your true
+aristocrat is not one who has eliminated, but one who controls or
+ignores it. Brave men are men who do things when they are afraid to do
+them, just as Nelson, even when he was seasick, and he was frequently
+seasick, was still master of the sea. Benham developed two leading ideas
+about fear; one that it is worse at the first onset, and far worse than
+any real experience, and the other that fear is essentially a social
+instinct. He set himself upon these lines to study--what can we call
+it?--the taming of fear, the nature, care, and management of fear....
+
+“Fear is very like pain in this, that it is a deterrent thing. It is
+superficial. Just as a man's skin is infinitely more sensitive than
+anything inside.... Once you have forced yourself or have been forced
+through the outward fear into vivid action or experience, you feel very
+little. The worst moment is before things happen. Rowe, the African
+sportsman, told me that he had seen cowardice often enough in the
+presence of lions, but he had never seen any one actually charged by a
+lion who did not behave well. I have heard the same thing of many sorts
+of dangers.
+
+“I began to suspect this first in the case of falling or jumping down.
+Giddiness may be an almost intolerable torture, and falling nothing of
+the sort. I once saw the face of an old man who had flung himself out
+of a high window in Rome, and who had been killed instantly on the
+pavement; it was not simply a serene face, it was glad, exalted. I
+suspect that when we have broken the shell of fear, falling may be
+delightful. Jumping down is, after all, only a steeper tobogganing, and
+tobogganing a milder jumping down. Always I used to funk at the top
+of the Cresta run. I suffered sometimes almost intolerably; I found
+it almost impossible to get away. The first ten yards was like being
+slashed open with a sharp sword. But afterwards there was nothing but
+joyful thrills. All instinct, too, fought against me when I tried high
+diving. I managed it, and began to like it. I had to give it up because
+of my ears, but not until I had established the habit of stepping
+through that moment of disinclination.
+
+“I was Challoner's passenger when he was killed at Sheerness. That was
+a queer unexpected experience, you may have supposed it an agony of
+terror, but indeed there was no fear in it at all. At any rate, I do not
+remember a moment of fear; it has gone clean out of my memory if ever it
+was there. We were swimming high and fast, three thousand feet or so, in
+a clear, sweet air over the town of Sheerness. The river, with a
+string of battleships, was far away to the west of us, and the endless
+grey-blue flats of the Thames to the north. The sun was low behind a
+bank of cloud. I was watching a motor-car, which seemed to be crawling
+slowly enough, though, no doubt, it was making a respectable pace,
+between two hedges down below. It is extraordinary how slowly everything
+seems to be going when one sees it from such an height.
+
+“Then the left wing of the monoplane came up like a door that slams,
+some wires whistled past my head, and one whipped off my helmet, and
+then, with the seat slipping away from me, down we went. I snatched
+unavailingly for the helmet, and then gripped the sides. It was like
+dropping in a boat suddenly into the trough of a wave--and going on
+dropping. We were both strapped, and I got my feet against the side and
+clung to the locked second wheel.
+
+“The sensation was as though something like an intermittent electric
+current was pouring through me. It's a ridiculous image to use, I can't
+justify it, but it was as if I was having cold blue light squirted
+through every pore of my being. There was an astonishment, a feeling
+of confirmation. 'Of course these things do happen sometimes,' I told
+myself. I don't remember that Challoner looked round or said anything at
+all. I am not sure that I looked at him....
+
+“There seemed to be a long interval of intensely excited curiosity, and
+I remember thinking, 'Lord, but we shall come a smash in a minute!'
+Far ahead I saw the grey sheds of Eastchurch and people strolling
+about apparently unaware of our disaster. There was a sudden silence as
+Challoner stopped the engine....
+
+“But the point I want to insist upon is that I did not feel afraid. I
+was simply enormously, terribly INTERESTED....
+
+“There came a tremendous jolt and a lunge, and we were both tipped
+forward, so that we were hanging forehead down by our straps, and it
+looked as if the sheds were in the sky, then I saw nothing but sky, then
+came another vast swerve, and we were falling sideways, sideways....
+
+“I was altogether out of breath and PHYSICALLY astonished, and I
+remember noting quite intelligently as we hit the ground how the green
+grass had an effect of POURING OUT in every direction from below us....
+
+“Then I remember a jerk and a feeling that I was flying up again. I was
+astonished by a tremendous popping--fabric, wires, everything seemed
+going pop, pop, pop, like a machine-gun, and then came a flash of
+intense pain as my arm crumpled up. It was quite impersonal pain. As
+impersonal as seeing intense colour. SPLINTERS! I remember the word came
+into my head instantly. I remember that very definitely.
+
+“I thought, I suppose, my arm was in splinters. Or perhaps of the scraps
+and ends of rods and wires flying about us. It is curious that while I
+remember the word I cannot recall the idea....
+
+“When I became conscious again the chief thing present in my mind was
+that all those fellows round were young soldiers who wouldn't at all
+understand bad behaviour. My arm was--orchestral, but still far from
+being real suffering IN me. Also I wanted to know what Challoner had
+got. They wouldn't understand my questions, and then I twisted round and
+saw from the negligent way his feet came out from under the engine that
+he must be dead. And dark red stains with bright red froth--
+
+“Of course!
+
+“There again the chief feeling was a sense of oddity. I wasn't sorry for
+him any more than I was for myself.
+
+“It seemed to me that it was all right with us both, remarkable, vivid,
+but all right....”
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+“But though there is little or no fear in an aeroplane, even when it
+is smashing up, there is fear about aeroplanes. There is something that
+says very urgently, 'Don't,' to the man who looks up into the sky. It
+is very interesting to note how at a place like Eastchurch or Brooklands
+the necessary discretion trails the old visceral feeling with it,
+and how men will hang about, ready to go up, resolved to go up, but
+delaying. Men of indisputable courage will get into a state between
+dread and laziness, and waste whole hours of flying weather on any
+excuse or no excuse. Once they are up that inhibition vanishes. The man
+who was delaying and delaying half an hour ago will now be cutting the
+most venturesome capers in the air. Few men are in a hurry to get down
+again. I mean that quite apart from the hesitation of landing, they like
+being up there.”
+
+Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory.
+
+“Fear, you see, is the inevitable janitor, but it is not the ruler of
+experience. That is what I am driving at in all this. The bark of danger
+is worse than its bite. Inside the portals there may be events and
+destruction, but terror stays defeated at the door. It may be that when
+that old man was killed by a horse the child who watched suffered more
+than he did....
+
+“I am sure that was so....”
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+As White read Benham's notes and saw how his argument drove on, he was
+reminded again and again of those schoolboy days and Benham's hardihood,
+and his own instinctive unreasonable reluctance to follow those gallant
+intellectual leads. If fear is an ancient instinctive boundary that the
+modern life, the aristocratic life, is bound to ignore and transcend,
+may this not also be the case with pain? We do a little adventure into
+the “life beyond fear”; may we not also think of adventuring into the
+life beyond pain? Is pain any saner a warning than fear? May not pain
+just as much as fear keep us from possible and splendid things? But why
+ask a question that is already answered in principle in every dentist's
+chair? Benham's idea, however, went much further than that, he was
+clearly suggesting that in pain itself, pain endured beyond a certain
+pitch, there might come pleasure again, an intensity of sensation
+that might have the colour of delight. He betrayed a real anxiety to
+demonstrate this possibility, he had the earnestness of a man who is
+sensible of dissentient elements within. He hated the thought of
+pain even more than he hated fear. His arguments did not in the least
+convince White, who stopped to poke the fire and assure himself of his
+own comfort in the midst of his reading.
+
+Young people and unseasoned people, Benham argued, are apt to imagine
+that if fear is increased and carried to an extreme pitch it becomes
+unbearable, one will faint or die; given a weak heart, a weak artery or
+any such structural defect and that may well happen, but it is just as
+possible that as the stimulation increases one passes through a brief
+ecstasy of terror to a new sane world, exalted but as sane as normal
+existence. There is the calmness of despair. Benham had made some notes
+to enforce this view, of the observed calm behaviour of men already
+hopelessly lost, men on sinking ships, men going to execution, men
+already maimed and awaiting the final stroke, but for the most part
+these were merely references to books and periodicals. In exactly the
+same way, he argued, we exaggerate the range of pain as if it were
+limitless. We think if we are unthinking that it passes into agony and
+so beyond endurance to destruction. It probably does nothing of the
+kind. Benham compared pain to the death range of the electric current.
+At a certain voltage it thrills, at a greater it torments and convulses,
+at a still greater it kills. But at enormous voltages, as Tesla was
+the first to demonstrate, it does no injury. And following on this came
+memoranda on the recorded behaviour of martyrs, on the self-torture of
+Hindoo ascetics, of the defiance of Red Indian prisoners.
+
+“These things,” Benham had written, “are much more horrible when one
+considers them from the point of view of an easy-chair”;--White gave
+an assenting nod--“ARE THEY REALLY HORRIBLE AT ALL? Is it possible that
+these charred and slashed and splintered persons, those Indians hanging
+from hooks, those walkers in the fiery furnace, have had glimpses
+through great windows that were worth the price they paid for them?
+Haven't we allowed those checks and barriers that are so important a
+restraint upon childish enterprise, to creep up into and distress and
+distort adult life?...
+
+“The modern world thinks too much as though painlessness and freedom
+from danger were ultimate ends. It is fear-haunted, it is troubled
+by the thoughts of pain and death, which it has never met except as
+well-guarded children meet these things, in exaggerated and untestable
+forms, in the menagerie or in nightmares. And so it thinks the discovery
+of anaesthetics the crowning triumph of civilization, and cosiness and
+innocent amusement, those ideals of the nursery, the whole purpose of
+mankind....”
+
+“Mm,” said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his brows
+and shook his head.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+But the bulk of Benham's discussion of fear was not concerned with
+this perverse and overstrained suggestion of pleasure reached through
+torture, this exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink at
+anything; it was an examination of the present range and use of fear
+that led gradually to something like a theory of control and discipline.
+The second of his two dominating ideas was that fear is an instinct
+arising only in isolation, that in a crowd there may be a collective
+panic, but that there is no real individual fear. Fear, Benham held,
+drives the man back to the crowd, the dog to its master, the wolf to the
+pack, and when it is felt that the danger is pooled, then fear leaves
+us. He was quite prepared to meet the objection that animals of a
+solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit fear. Some of this apparent fear,
+he argued, was merely discretion, and what is not discretion is the
+survival of an infantile characteristic. The fear felt by a tiger cub
+is certainly a social emotion, that drives it back to the other cubs,
+to its mother and the dark hiding of the lair. The fear of a fully grown
+tiger sends it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, that must be
+“still reminiscent of the maternal lair.” But fear has very little hold
+upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme readiness to
+resentment and rage.
+
+“Like most inexperienced people,” ran his notes, “I was astonished at
+the reported feats of men in war; I believed they were exaggerated,
+and that there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy of silence about
+their real behaviour. But when on my way to visit India for the third
+time I turned off to see what I could of the fighting before Adrianople,
+I discovered at once that a thousand casually selected conscripts will,
+every one of them, do things together that not one of them could by any
+means be induced to do alone. I saw men not merely obey orders that
+gave them the nearly certain prospect of death, but I saw them exceeding
+orders; I saw men leap out of cover for the mere sake of defiance, and
+fall shot through and smashed by a score of bullets. I saw a number
+of Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, several quite frightfully
+wounded, refuse chloroform merely to impress the English onlooker, some
+of their injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched a line
+of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on quite manifestly cheerful
+with men dropping out and wriggling, and men dropping out and lying
+still until every other man was down.... Not one man would have gone up
+that hill alone, without onlookers....”
+
+Rowe, the lion hunter, told Benham that only on one occasion in his life
+had he given way to ungovernable fear, and that was when he was alone.
+Many times he had been in fearful situations in the face of charging
+lions and elephants, and once he had been bowled over and carried some
+distance by a lion, but on none of these occasions had fear demoralized
+him. There was no question of his general pluck. But on one occasion he
+was lost in rocky waterless country in Somaliland. He strayed out in the
+early morning while his camels were being loaded, followed some antelope
+too far, and lost his bearings. He looked up expecting to see the sun
+on his right hand and found it on his left. He became bewildered. He
+wandered some time and then fired three signal shots and got no reply.
+Then losing his head he began shouting. He had only four or five more
+cartridges and no water-bottle. His men were accustomed to his going on
+alone, and might not begin to remark upon his absence until sundown....
+It chanced, however, that one of the shikari noted the water-bottle he
+had left behind and organized a hunt for him.
+
+Long before they found him he had passed to an extremity of terror. The
+world had become hideous and threatening, the sun was a pitiless glare,
+each rocky ridge he clambered became more dreadful than the last, each
+new valley into which he looked more hateful and desolate, the cramped
+thorn bushes threatened him gauntly, the rocks had a sinister lustre,
+and in every blue shadow about him the night and death lurked and
+waited. There was no hurry for them, presently they would spread out
+again and join and submerge him, presently in the confederated darkness
+he could be stalked and seized and slain. Yes, this he admitted was real
+fear. He had cracked his voice, yelling as a child yells. And then he
+had become afraid of his own voice....
+
+“Now this excess of fear in isolation, this comfort in a crowd, in
+support and in a refuge, even when support or refuge is quite illusory,
+is just exactly what one would expect of fear if one believed it to be
+an instinct which has become a misfit. In the ease of the soldier fear
+is so much a misfit that instead of saving him for the most part it
+destroys him. Raw soldiers under fire bunch together and armies fight in
+masses, men are mowed down in swathes, because only so is the courage of
+the common men sustained, only so can they be brave, albeit spread out
+and handling their weapons as men of unqualified daring would handle
+them they would be infinitely safer and more effective....
+
+“And all of us, it may be, are restrained by this misfit fear from a
+thousand bold successful gestures of mind and body, we are held back
+from the attainment of mighty securities in pitiful temporary shelters
+that are perhaps in the end no better than traps....”
+
+From such considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the crowd
+can be replaced in a man's imagination, how far some substitute for that
+social backing can be made to serve the same purpose in neutralizing
+fear. He wrote with the calm of a man who weighs the probabilities of a
+riddle, and with the zeal of a man lost to every material consideration.
+His writing, it seemed to White, had something of the enthusiastic
+whiteness of his face, the enthusiastic brightness of his eyes. We can
+no more banish fear from our being at present than we can carve out the
+fleshy pillars of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain. It is deep
+in our inheritance. As deep as hunger. And just as we have to satisfy
+hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy the
+unconquerable importunity of fear. We have to reassure our faltering
+instincts. There must be something to take the place of lair and
+familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we must carry with
+us into the lonely places. For it is true that man has now not only
+to learn to fight in open order instead of in a phalanx, but he has to
+think and plan and act in open order, to live in open order....
+
+Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, “This brings
+me to God.”
+
+“The devil it does!” said White, roused to a keener attention.
+
+“By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so long as
+we feel indeed alone. An isolated man, an egoist, an Epicurean man, will
+always fail himself in the solitary place. There must be something more
+with us to sustain us against this vast universe than the spark of life
+that began yesterday and must be extinguished to-morrow. There can be
+no courage beyond social courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd,
+until there is in us the sense of God. But God is a word that covers a
+multitude of meanings. When I was a boy I was a passionate atheist, I
+defied God, and so far as God is the mere sanction of social traditions
+and pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd's will in canonicals, I
+do still deny him and repudiate him. That God I heard of first from my
+nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper God of all the nursemaids
+of mankind. But there is another God than that God of obedience, God the
+immortal adventurer in me, God who calls men from home and country, God
+scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in a nail-pierced body out of
+death and came not to bring peace but a sword.”
+
+With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who
+was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of
+Benham's spirit. They were written in pencil; they were unfinished when
+he died.
+
+(Surely the man was not a Christian!)
+
+“You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you cannot
+suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain because you
+have identified your life with the honour of mankind and the insatiable
+adventurousness of man's imagination, so that the possible death is
+negligible and the possible achievement altogether outweighs it.”...
+
+White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.
+
+He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had always
+taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever. But this
+was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it seemed to
+him, a posthumous betrayal....
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon Benham.
+He had gone with Kepple, of the forestry department, into the jungle
+country in the hills above the Tapti. He had been very anxious to see
+something of that aspect of Indian life, and he had snatched at the
+chance Kepple had given him. But they had scarcely started before the
+expedition was brought to an end by an accident, Kepple was thrown by
+a pony and his ankle broken. He and Benham bandaged it as well as they
+could, and a litter was sent for, and meanwhile they had to wait in the
+camp that was to have been the centre of their jungle raids. The second
+day of this waiting was worse for Kepple than the first, and he suffered
+much from the pressure of this amateurish bandaging. In the evening
+Benham got cool water from the well and rearranged things better; the
+two men dined and smoked under their thatched roof beneath the big
+banyan, and then Kepple, tired out by his day of pain, was carried to
+his tent. Presently he fell asleep and Benham was left to himself.
+
+Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to sleep.
+He felt full of life and anxious for happenings.
+
+He went back and sat down upon the iron bedstead beneath the banyan,
+that Kepple had lain upon through the day, and he watched the soft
+immensity of the Indian night swallow up the last lingering colours of
+the world. It left the outlines, it obliterated nothing, but it stripped
+off the superficial reality of things. The moon was full and high
+overhead, and the light had not so much gone as changed from definition
+and the blazing glitter and reflections of solidity to a translucent and
+unsubstantial clearness. The jungle that bordered the little encampment
+north, south, and west seemed to have crept a little nearer, enriched
+itself with blackness, taken to itself voices.
+
+(Surely it had been silent during the day.)
+
+A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead grass and the
+leaves. In the day the air had been still.
+
+Immediately after the sunset there had been a great crying of peacocks
+in the distance, but that was over now; the crickets, however,
+were still noisy, and a persistent sound had become predominant, an
+industrious unmistakable sound, a sound that took his mind back to
+England, in midsummer. It was like a watchman's rattle--a nightjar!
+
+So there were nightjars here in India, too! One might have expected
+something less familiar. And then came another cry from far away over
+the heat-stripped tree-tops, a less familiar cry. It was repeated. Was
+that perhaps some craving leopard, a tiger cat, a panther?--
+
+“HUNT, HUNT”; that might be a deer.
+
+Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite close
+at hand. A monkey?...
+
+These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were
+bats....
+
+Of course, the day jungle is the jungle asleep. This was its waking
+hour. Now the deer were arising from their forms, the bears creeping
+out of their dens amidst the rocks and blundering down the gullies,
+the tigers and panthers and jungle cats stalking noiselessly from their
+lairs in the grass. Countless creatures that had hidden from the heat
+and pitiless exposure of the day stood now awake and alertly intent upon
+their purposes, grazed or sought water, flitting delicately through the
+moonlight and shadows. The jungle was awakening. Again Benham heard that
+sound like the belling of a stag....
+
+This was the real life of the jungle, this night life, into which man
+did not go. Here he was on the verge of a world that for all the stuffed
+trophies of the sportsman and the specimens of the naturalist is still
+almost as unknown as if it was upon another planet. What intruders men
+are, what foreigners in the life of this ancient system!
+
+He looked over his shoulder, and there were the two little tents,
+one that sheltered Kepple and one that awaited him, and beyond, in an
+irregular line, glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men. One or two
+turbaned figures still flitted about, and there was a voice--low,
+monotonous--it must have been telling a tale. Further, sighing and
+stirring ever and again, were tethered beasts, and then a great pale
+space of moonlight and the clumsy outlines of the village well. The
+clustering village itself slept in darkness beyond the mango trees,
+and still remoter the black encircling jungle closed in. One might have
+fancied this was the encampment of newly-come invaders, were it not
+for the larger villages that are overgrown with thickets and altogether
+swallowed up again in the wilderness, and for the deserted temples that
+are found rent asunder by the roots of trees and the ancient embankments
+that hold water only for the drinking of the sambur deer....
+
+Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again....
+
+He had come far out of his way to visit this strange world of the
+ancient life, that now recedes and dwindles before our new civilization,
+that seems fated to shrivel up and pass altogether before the dry
+advance of physical science and material organization. He was full of
+unsatisfied curiosities about its fierce hungers and passions, its fears
+and cruelties, its instincts and its well-nigh incommunicable and yet
+most precious understandings. He had long ceased to believe that the
+wild beast is wholly evil, and safety and plenty the ultimate good for
+men....
+
+Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life than he
+was now.
+
+It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand and so
+inaccessible....
+
+As Benham sat brooding over his disappointment the moon, swimming on
+through the still circle of the hours, passed slowly over him. The
+lights and shadows about him changed by imperceptible gradations and
+a long pale alley where the native cart track drove into the forest,
+opened slowly out of the darkness, slowly broadened, slowly lengthened.
+It opened out to him with a quality of invitation....
+
+There was the jungle before him. Was it after all so inaccessible?
+
+“Come!” the road said to him.
+
+Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the moonlight and stood
+motionless.
+
+Was he afraid?
+
+Even now some hungry watchful monster might lurk in yonder shadows,
+watching with infinite still patience. Kepple had told him how they
+would sit still for hours--staring unblinkingly as cats stare at a
+fire--and then crouch to advance. Beneath the shrill overtone of
+the nightjars, what noiseless grey shapes, what deep breathings and
+cracklings and creepings might there not be?...
+
+Was he afraid?
+
+That question determined him to go.
+
+He hesitated whether he should take a gun. A stick? A gun, he knew, was
+a dangerous thing to an inexperienced man. No! He would go now, even as
+he was with empty hands. At least he would go as far as the end of that
+band of moonlight. If for no other reason than because he was afraid.
+NOW!
+
+For a moment it seemed to him as though his feet were too heavy to lift
+and then, hands in pockets, khaki-clad, an almost invisible figure, he
+strolled towards the cart-track.
+
+Come to that, he halted for a moment to regard the distant fires of
+the men. No one would miss him. They would think he was in his tent.
+He faced the stirring quiet ahead. The cart-track was a rutted path of
+soft, warm sand, on which he went almost noiselessly. A bird squabbled
+for an instant in a thicket. A great white owl floated like a flake of
+moonlight across the track and vanished without a sound among the trees.
+
+Along the moonlit path went Benham, and when he passed near trees his
+footsteps became noisy with the rustle and crash of dead leaves. The
+jungle was full of moonlight; twigs, branches, creepers, grass-clumps
+came out acutely vivid. The trees and bushes stood in pools of darkness,
+and beyond were pale stretches of misty moonshine and big rocks shining
+with an unearthly lustre. Things seemed to be clear and yet uncertain.
+It was as if they dissolved or retired a little and then returned to
+solidity.
+
+A sudden chattering broke out overhead, and black across the great
+stars soared a flying squirrel and caught a twig, and ran for shelter.
+A second hesitated in a tree-top and pursued. They chased each other and
+vanished abruptly. He forgot his sense of insecurity in the interest of
+these active little silhouettes. And he noted how much bigger and more
+wonderful the stars can look when one sees them through interlacing
+branches.
+
+Ahead was darkness; but not so dark when he came to it that the track
+was invisible. He was at the limit of his intention, but now he saw that
+that had been a childish project. He would go on, he would walk right
+into the jungle. His first disinclination was conquered, and the soft
+intoxication of the subtropical moonshine was in his blood.... But he
+wished he could walk as a spirit walks, without this noise of leaves....
+
+Yes, this was very wonderful and beautiful, and there must always be
+jungles for men to walk in. Always there must be jungles....
+
+Some small beast snarled and bolted from under his feet. He stopped
+sharply. He had come into a darkness under great boughs, and now he
+stood still as the little creature scuttled away. Beyond the track
+emerged into a dazzling whiteness....
+
+In the stillness he could hear the deer belling again in the distance,
+and then came a fuss of monkeys in a group of trees near at hand. He
+remained still until this had died away into mutterings.
+
+Then on the verge of movement he was startled by a ripe mango that
+slipped from its stalk and fell out of the tree and struck his hand.
+It took a little time to understand that, and then he laughed, and his
+muscles relaxed, and he went on again.
+
+A thorn caught at him and he disentangled himself.
+
+He crossed the open space, and the moon was like a great shield of light
+spread out above him. All the world seemed swimming in its radiance. The
+stars were like lamps in a mist of silvery blue.
+
+The track led him on across white open spaces of shrivelled grass and
+sand, amidst trees where shadows made black patternings upon the silver,
+and then it plunged into obscurities. For a time it lifted, and then
+on one hand the bush fell away, and he saw across a vast moonlit valley
+wide undulations of open cultivation, belts of jungle, copses, and a
+great lake as black as ebony. For a time the path ran thus open, and
+then the jungle closed in again and there were more thickets, more
+levels of grass, and in one place far overhead among the branches he
+heard and stood for a time perplexed at a vast deep humming of bees....
+
+Presently a black monster with a hunched back went across his path
+heedless of him and making a great noise in the leaves. He stood quite
+still until it had gone. He could not tell whether it was a boar or
+hyaena; most probably, he thought, a boar because of the heaviness of
+its rush.
+
+The path dropped downhill for a time, crossed a ravine, ascended. He
+passed a great leafless tree on which there were white flowers. On the
+ground also, in the darkness under the tree, there were these flowers;
+they were dropping noiselessly, and since they were visible in the
+shadows, it seemed to him that they must be phosphorescent. And they
+emitted a sweetish scent that lay heavily athwart the path. Presently he
+passed another such tree. Then he became aware of a tumult ahead of him,
+a smashing of leaves, a snorting and slobbering, grunting and sucking,
+a whole series of bestial sounds. He halted for a little while, and then
+drew nearer, picking his steps to avoid too great a noise. Here were
+more of those white-blossomed trees, and beneath, in the darkness,
+something very black and big was going to and fro, eating greedily. Then
+he found that there were two and then more of these black things, three
+or four of them.
+
+Curiosity made Benham draw nearer, very softly.
+
+Presently one showed in a patch of moonlight, startlingly big, a huge,
+black hairy monster with a long white nose on a grotesque face, and he
+was stuffing armfuls of white blossom into his mouth with his curved
+fore claws. He took not the slightest notice of the still man, who stood
+perhaps twenty yards away from him. He was too blind and careless. He
+snorted and smacked his slobbering lips, and plunged into the shadows
+again. Benham heard him root among the leaves and grunt appreciatively.
+The air was heavy with the reek of the crushed flowers.
+
+For some time Benham remained listening to and peering at these
+preoccupied gluttons. At last he shrugged his shoulders, and left them
+and went on his way. For a long time he could hear them, then just as he
+was on the verge of forgetting them altogether, some dispute arose among
+them, and there began a vast uproar, squeals, protests, comments, one
+voice ridiculously replete and authoritative, ridiculously suggestive
+of a drunken judge with his mouth full, and a shrill voice of grievance
+high above the others....
+
+The uproar of the bears died away at last, almost abruptly, and left the
+jungle to the incessant night-jars....
+
+For what end was this life of the jungle?
+
+All Benham's senses were alert to the sounds and appearances about him,
+and at the same time his mind was busy with the perplexities of that
+riddle. Was the jungle just an aimless pool of life that man must drain
+and clear away? Or is it to have a use in the greater life of our race
+that now begins? Will man value the jungle as he values the precipice,
+for the sake of his manhood? Will he preserve it?
+
+Man must keep hard, man must also keep fierce. Will the jungle keep him
+fierce?
+
+For life, thought Benham, there must be insecurity....
+
+He had missed the track....
+
+He was now in a second ravine. He was going downward, walking on silvery
+sand amidst great boulders, and now there was a new sound in the
+air--. It was the croaking of frogs. Ahead was a solitary gleam. He was
+approaching a jungle pool....
+
+Suddenly the stillness was alive, in a panic uproar. “HONK!” cried a
+great voice, and “HONK!” There was a clatter of hoofs, a wild rush--a
+rush as it seemed towards him. Was he being charged? He backed against a
+rock. A great pale shape leaped by him, an antlered shape. It was a herd
+of big deer bolting suddenly out of the stillness. He heard the swish
+and smash of their retreat grow distant, disperse. He remained standing
+with his back to the rock.
+
+Slowly the strophe and antistrophe of frogs and goat-suckers resumed
+possession of his consciousness. But now some primitive instinct
+perhaps or some subconscious intimation of danger made him meticulously
+noiseless.
+
+He went on down a winding sound-deadening path of sand towards the
+drinking-place. He came to a wide white place that was almost level, and
+beyond it under clustering pale-stemmed trees shone the mirror surface
+of some ancient tank, and, sharp and black, a dog-like beast sat on its
+tail in the midst of this space, started convulsively and went slinking
+into the undergrowth. Benham paused for a moment and then walked out
+softly into the light, and, behold! as if it were to meet him, came
+a monster, a vast dark shape drawing itself lengthily out of the
+blackness, and stopped with a start as if it had been instantly changed
+to stone.
+
+It had stopped with one paw advanced. Its striped mask was light and
+dark grey in the moonlight, grey but faintly tinged with ruddiness; its
+mouth was a little open, its fangs and a pendant of viscous saliva shone
+vivid. Its great round-pupilled eyes regarded him stedfastly. At last
+the nightmare of Benham's childhood had come true, and he was face to
+face with a tiger, uncaged, uncontrolled.
+
+For some moments neither moved, neither the beast nor the man. They
+stood face to face, each perhaps with an equal astonishment, motionless
+and soundless, in that mad Indian moonlight that makes all things like a
+dream.
+
+Benham stood quite motionless, and body and mind had halted together.
+That confrontation had an interminableness that had nothing to do with
+the actual passage of time. Then some trickle of his previous thoughts
+stirred in the frozen quiet of his mind.
+
+He spoke hoarsely. “I am Man,” he said, and lifted a hand as he spoke.
+“The Thought of the world.”
+
+His heart leapt within him as the tiger moved. But the great beast
+went sideways, gardant, only that its head was low, three noiseless
+instantaneous strides it made, and stood again watching him.
+
+“Man,” he said, in a voice that had no sound, and took a step forward.
+
+“Wough!” With two bounds the monster had become a great grey streak
+that crackled and rustled in the shadows of the trees. And then it
+had vanished, become invisible and inaudible with a kind of
+instantaneousness.
+
+For some seconds or some minutes Benham stood rigid, fearlessly
+expectant, and then far away up the ravine he heard the deer repeat
+their cry of alarm, and understood with a new wisdom that the tiger had
+passed among them and was gone....
+
+He walked on towards the deserted tank and now he was talking aloud.
+
+“I understand the jungle. I understand.... If a few men die here, what
+matter? There are worse deaths than being killed....
+
+“What is this fool's trap of security?
+
+“Every time in my life that I have fled from security I have fled from
+death....
+
+“Let men stew in their cities if they will. It is in the lonely places,
+in jungles and mountains, in snows and fires, in the still observatories
+and the silent laboratories, in those secret and dangerous places where
+life probes into life, it is there that the masters of the world, the
+lords of the beast, the rebel sons of Fate come to their own....
+
+“You sleeping away there in the cities! Do you know what it means for
+you that I am here to-night?
+
+“Do you know what it means to you?
+
+“I am just one--just the precursor.
+
+“Presently, if you will not budge, those hot cities must be burnt about
+you. You must come out of them....”
+
+He wandered now uttering his thoughts as they came to him, and he saw no
+more living creatures because they fled and hid before the sound of his
+voice. He wandered until the moon, larger now and yellow tinged, was low
+between the black bars of the tree stems. And then it sank very suddenly
+behind a hilly spur and the light failed swiftly.
+
+He stumbled and went with difficulty. He could go no further among these
+rocks and ravines, and he sat down at the foot of a tree to wait for
+day.
+
+He sat very still indeed.
+
+A great stillness came over the world, a velvet silence that wrapped
+about him, as the velvet shadows wrapped about him. The corncrakes had
+ceased, all the sounds and stir of animal life had died away, the breeze
+had fallen. A drowsing comfort took possession of him. He grew more
+placid and more placid still. He was enormously content to find that
+fear had fled before him and was gone. He drifted into that state of
+mind when one thinks without ideas, when one's mind is like a starless
+sky, serene and empty.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+Some hours later Benham found that the trees and rocks were growing
+visible again, and he saw a very bright star that he knew must be
+Lucifer rising amidst the black branches. He was sitting upon a rock at
+the foot of a slender-stemmed leafless tree. He had been asleep, and it
+was daybreak. Everything was coldly clear and colourless.
+
+He must have slept soundly.
+
+He heard a cock crow, and another answer--jungle fowl these must be,
+because there could be no village within earshot--and then far away and
+bringing back memories of terraced houses and ripe walled gardens, was
+the scream of peacocks. And some invisible bird was making a hollow
+beating sound among the trees near at hand. TUNK.... TUNK, and out of
+the dry grass came a twittering.
+
+There was a green light in the east that grew stronger, and the stars
+after their magnitudes were dissolving in the blue; only a few remained
+faintly visible. The sound of birds increased. Through the trees he saw
+towering up a great mauve thing like the back of a monster,--but that
+was nonsense, it was the crest of a steep hillside covered with woods of
+teak.
+
+He stood up and stretched himself, and wondered whether he had dreamed
+of a tiger.
+
+He tried to remember and retrace the course of his over-night
+wanderings.
+
+A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and then
+far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart.
+
+He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly and
+thoughtfully.
+
+Presently he came to a familiar place, a group of trees, a sheet of
+water, and the ruins of an old embankment. It was the ancient tank of
+his overnight encounter. The pool of his dream?
+
+With doubt still in his mind, he walked round its margin to the sandy
+level beyond, and cast about and sought intently, and at last found, and
+then found clearly, imposed upon the tracks of several sorts of deer and
+the footprints of many biggish birds, first the great spoor of the
+tiger and then his own. Here the beast had halted, and here it had leapt
+aside. Here his own footmarks stopped. Here his heels had come together.
+
+It had been no dream.
+
+There was a white mist upon the water of the old tank like the bloom
+upon a plum, and the trees about it seemed smaller and the sand-space
+wider and rougher than they had seemed in the moonshine. Then the ground
+had looked like a floor of frosted silver.
+
+And thence he went on upward through the fresh morning, until just as
+the east grew red with sunrise, he reached the cart-track from which he
+had strayed overnight. It was, he found, a longer way back to the camp
+than he remembered it to be. Perhaps he had struck the path further
+along. It curved about and went up and down and crossed three ravines.
+At last he came to that trampled place of littered white blossom under
+great trees where he had seen the bears.
+
+The sunlight went before him in a sheaf of golden spears, and his
+shadow, that was at first limitless, crept towards his feet. The dew had
+gone from the dead grass and the sand was hot to his dry boots before he
+came back into the open space about the great banyan and the tents. And
+Kepple, refreshed by a night's rest and coffee, was wondering loudly
+where the devil he had gone.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE BOY GROWS UP
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Benham was the son of a schoolmaster. His father was assistant first at
+Cheltenham, and subsequently at Minchinghampton, and then he became
+head and later on sole proprietor of Martindale House, a high-class
+preparatory school at Seagate. He was extremely successful for some
+years, as success goes in the scholastic profession, and then disaster
+overtook him in the shape of a divorce. His wife, William Porphyry's
+mother, made the acquaintance of a rich young man named Nolan, who was
+recuperating at Seagate from the sequelae of snake-bite, malaria, and a
+gun accident in Brazil. She ran away with him, and she was divorced.
+She was, however, unable to marry him because he died at Wiesbaden
+only three days after the Reverend Harold Benham obtained his decree
+absolute. Instead, therefore, being a woman of great spirit, enterprise
+and sweetness, she married Godfrey Marayne, afterwards Sir Godfrey
+Marayne, the great London surgeon.
+
+Nolan was a dark, rather melancholy and sentimental young man, and he
+left about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs. Benham
+and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed himself to have
+injured. With this and a husband already distinguished, she returned
+presently to London, and was on the whole fairly well received there.
+
+It was upon the reverend gentleman at Seagate that the brunt of this
+divorce fell. There is perhaps a certain injustice in the fact that a
+schoolmaster who has lost his wife should also lose the more valuable
+proportion of his pupils, but the tone of thought in England is against
+any association of a schoolmaster with matrimonial irregularity. And
+also Mr. Benham remarried. It would certainly have been better for him
+if he could have produced a sister. His school declined and his efforts
+to resuscitate it only hastened its decay. Conceiving that he could now
+only appeal to the broader-minded, more progressive type of parent,
+he became an educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the
+curriculum with increasing frequency to the TIMES. He expended a
+considerable fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science laboratory
+and a fives court; he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teaching
+Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about a thousand volumes,
+including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late Lord Avebury,
+to the school equipment. None of these things did anything but enhance
+the suspicion of laxity his wife's escapade had created in the limited
+opulent and discreet class to which his establishment appealed. One
+boy who, under the influence of the Hundred Best Books, had quoted the
+ZEND-AVESTA to an irascible but influential grandfather, was withdrawn
+without notice or compensation in the middle of the term. It intensifies
+the tragedy of the Reverend Harold Benham's failure that in no
+essential respect did his school depart from the pattern of all other
+properly-conducted preparatory schools.
+
+In appearance he was near the average of scholastic English gentlemen.
+He displayed a manifest handsomeness somewhat weakened by disregard and
+disuse, a large moustache and a narrow high forehead. His rather
+tired brown eyes were magnified by glasses. He was an active man in
+unimportant things, with a love for the phrase “ship-shape,” and he
+played cricket better than any one else on the staff. He walked in wide
+strides, and would sometimes use the tail of his gown on the blackboard.
+Like so many clergymen and schoolmasters, he had early distrusted
+his natural impulse in conversation, and had adopted the defensive
+precaution of a rather formal and sonorous speech, which habit had made
+a part of him. His general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up
+things that might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice,
+keeping up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was
+only too manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy of
+administration in a school that must not be too manifestly impoverished,
+keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and rather a flutterer
+of dovecots--with its method of manual training for example--keeping up
+ESPRIT DE CORPS and the manliness of himself and every one about him,
+keeping up his affection for his faithful second wife and his complete
+forgetfulness of and indifference to that spirit of distracting impulse
+and insubordination away there in London, who had once been his delight
+and insurmountable difficulty. “After my visits to her,” wrote Benham,
+“he would show by a hundred little expressions and poses and acts how
+intensely he wasn't noting that anything of the sort had occurred.”
+
+But one thing that from the outset the father seemed to have failed to
+keep up thoroughly was his intention to mould and dominate his son.
+
+The advent of his boy had been a tremendous event in the reverend
+gentleman's life. It is not improbable that his disposition to
+monopolize the pride of this event contributed to the ultimate
+disruption of his family. It left so few initiatives within the home to
+his wife. He had been an early victim to that wave of philoprogenitive
+and educational enthusiasm which distinguished the closing decade of the
+nineteenth century. He was full of plans in those days for the education
+of his boy, and the thought of the youngster played a large part in
+the series of complicated emotional crises with which he celebrated
+the departure of his wife, crises in which a number of old school and
+college friends very generously assisted--spending weekends at Seagate
+for this purpose, and mingling tobacco, impassioned handclasps and
+suchlike consolation with much patient sympathetic listening to his
+carefully balanced analysis of his feelings. He declared that his son
+was now his one living purpose in life, and he sketched out a scheme of
+moral and intellectual training that he subsequently embodied in five
+very stimulating and intimate articles for the SCHOOL WORLD, but never
+put into more than partial operation.
+
+“I have read my father's articles upon this subject,” wrote Benham,
+“and I am still perplexed to measure just what I owe to him. Did he ever
+attempt this moral training he contemplated so freely? I don't think
+he did. I know now, I knew then, that he had something in his mind....
+There were one or two special walks we had together, he invited me
+to accompany him with a certain portentousness, and we would go out
+pregnantly making superficial remarks about the school cricket and
+return, discussing botany, with nothing said.
+
+“His heart failed him.
+
+“Once or twice, too, he seemed to be reaching out at me from the school
+pulpit.
+
+“I think that my father did manage to convey to me his belief that there
+were these fine things, honour, high aims, nobilities. If I did not get
+this belief from him then I do not know how I got it. But it was as if
+he hinted at a treasure that had got very dusty in an attic, a treasure
+which he hadn't himself been able to spend....”
+
+The father who had intended to mould his son ended by watching him grow,
+not always with sympathy or understanding. He was an overworked man
+assailed by many futile anxieties. One sees him striding about the
+establishment with his gown streaming out behind him urging on the
+groundsman or the gardener, or dignified, expounding the particular
+advantages of Seagate to enquiring parents, one sees him unnaturally
+cheerful and facetious at the midday dinner table, one imagines him
+keeping up high aspirations in a rather too hastily scribbled sermon in
+the school pulpit, or keeping up an enthusiasm for beautiful language in
+a badly-prepared lesson on Virgil, or expressing unreal indignation and
+unjustifiably exalted sentiments to evil doers, and one realizes his
+disadvantage against the quiet youngster whose retentive memory was
+storing up all these impressions for an ultimate judgment, and one
+understands, too, a certain relief that mingled with his undeniable
+emotion when at last the time came for young Benham, “the one living
+purpose” of his life, to be off to Minchinghampton and the next step in
+the mysterious ascent of the English educational system.
+
+Three times at least, and with an increased interval, the father wrote
+fine fatherly letters that would have stood the test of publication.
+Then his communications became comparatively hurried and matter-of-fact.
+His boy's return home for the holidays was always rather a stirring time
+for his private feelings, but he became more and more inexpressive. He
+would sometimes lay a hand on those growing shoulders and then withdraw
+it. They felt braced-up shoulders, stiffly inflexible or--they would
+wince. And when one has let the habit of indefinite feelings grow upon
+one, what is there left to say? If one did say anything one might be
+asked questions....
+
+One or two of the long vacations they spent abroad together. The last
+of these occasions followed Benham's convalescence at Montana and his
+struggle with the Bisse; the two went to Zermatt and did several peaks
+and crossed the Theodule, and it was clear that their joint expeditions
+were a strain upon both of them. The father thought the son reckless,
+unskilful, and impatient; the son found the father's insistence upon
+guides, ropes, precautions, the recognized way, the highest point and
+back again before you get a chill, and talk about it sagely but very,
+very modestly over pipes, tiresome. He wanted to wander in deserts of
+ice and see over the mountains, and discover what it is to be benighted
+on a precipice. And gradually he was becoming familiar with his father's
+repertory of Greek quotations. There was no breach between them, but
+each knew that holiday was the last they would ever spend together....
+
+The court had given the custody of young William Porphyry into his
+father's hands, but by a generous concession it was arranged that his
+mother should have him to see her for an hour or so five times a year.
+The Nolan legacy, however, coming upon the top of this, introduced
+a peculiar complication that provided much work for tactful
+intermediaries, and gave great and increasing scope for painful
+delicacies on the part of Mr. Benham as the boy grew up.
+
+“I see,” said the father over his study pipe and with his glasses fixed
+on remote distances above the head of the current sympathizer, “I see
+more and more clearly that the tale of my sacrifices is not yet at an
+end.... In many respects he is like her.... Quick. Too quick.... He must
+choose. But I know his choice. Yes, yes,--I'm not blind. She's worked
+upon him.... I have done what I could to bring out the manhood in him.
+Perhaps it will bear the strain.... It will be a wrench, old man--God
+knows.”
+
+He did his very best to make it a wrench.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Benham's mother, whom he saw quarterly and also on the first of May,
+because it was her birthday, touched and coloured his imagination far
+more than his father did. She was now Lady Marayne, and a prominent,
+successful, and happy little lady. Her dereliction had been forgiven
+quite soon, and whatever whisper of it remained was very completely
+forgotten during the brief period of moral kindliness which followed
+the accession of King Edward the Seventh. It no doubt contributed to
+her social reinstatement that her former husband was entirely devoid
+of social importance, while, on the other hand, Sir Godfrey Marayne's
+temporary monopoly of the caecal operation which became so fashionable
+in the last decade of Queen Victoria's reign as to be practically
+epidemic, created a strong feeling in her favour.
+
+She was blue-eyed and very delicately complexioned, quick-moving, witty,
+given to little storms of clean enthusiasm; she loved handsome things,
+brave things, successful things, and the respect and affection of all
+the world. She did quite what she liked upon impulse, and nobody ever
+thought ill of her.
+
+Her family were the Mantons of Blent, quite good west-country people.
+She had broken away from them before she was twenty to marry Benham,
+whom she had idealized at a tennis party. He had talked of his work and
+she had seen it in a flash, the noblest work in the world, him at
+his daily divine toil and herself a Madonna surrounded by a troupe of
+Blessed Boys--all of good family, some of quite the best. For a time she
+had kept it up even more than he had, and then Nolan had distracted her
+with a realization of the heroism that goes to the ends of the earth.
+She became sick with desire for the forests of Brazil, and the Pacific,
+and--a peak in Darien. Immediately the school was frowsty beyond
+endurance, and for the first time she let herself perceive how
+dreadfully a gentleman and a scholar can smell of pipes and tobacco.
+Only one course lay open to a woman of spirit....
+
+For a year she did indeed live like a woman of spirit, and it was at
+Nolan's bedside that Marayne was first moved to admiration. She was
+plucky. All men love a plucky woman.
+
+Sir Godfrey Marayne smelt a good deal of antiseptic soap, but he talked
+in a way that amused her, and he trusted as well as adored her. She did
+what she liked with his money, her own money, and her son's trust money,
+and she did very well. From the earliest Benham's visits were to a
+gracious presence amidst wealthy surroundings. The transit from the
+moral blamelessness of Seagate had an entirely misleading effect of
+ascent.
+
+Their earlier encounters became rather misty in his memory; they
+occurred at various hotels in Seagate. Afterwards he would go, first
+taken by a governess, and later going alone, to Charing Cross, where he
+would be met, in earlier times by a maid and afterwards by a deferential
+manservant who called him “Sir,” and conveyed, sometimes in a hansom cab
+and later in a smart brougham, by Trafalgar Square, Lower Regent Street,
+Piccadilly, and streets of increasing wealth and sublimity to Sir
+Godfrey's house in Desborough Street. Very naturally he fell into
+thinking of these discreet and well-governed West End streets as a part
+of his mother's atmosphere.
+
+The house had a dignified portico, and always before he had got down
+to the pavement the door opened agreeably and a second respectful
+manservant stood ready. Then came the large hall, with its noiseless
+carpets and great Chinese jars, its lacquered cabinets and the wide
+staircase, and floating down the wide staircase, impatient to greet him,
+light and shining as a flower petal, sweet and welcoming, radiating a
+joyfulness as cool and clear as a dewy morning, came his mother. “WELL,
+little man, my son,” she would cry in her happy singing voice, “WELL?”
+
+So he thought she must always be, but indeed these meetings meant very
+much to her, she dressed for them and staged them, she perceived the
+bright advantages of her rarity and she was quite determined to have
+her son when the time came to possess him. She kissed him but not
+oppressively, she caressed him cleverly; it was only on these rare
+occasions that he was ever kissed or caressed, and she talked to his shy
+boyishness until it felt a more spirited variety of manhood. “What have
+you been doing?” she asked, “since I saw you last.”
+
+She never said he had grown, but she told him he looked tall; and though
+the tea was a marvellous display it was never an obtrusive tea, it
+wasn't poked at a fellow; a various plenty flowed well within reach of
+one's arm, like an agreeable accompaniment to their conversation.
+
+“What have you done? All sorts of brave things? Do you swim now? I can
+swim. Oh! I can swim half a mile. Some day we will swim races together.
+Why not? And you ride?...
+
+“The horse bolted--and you stuck on? Did you squeak? I stick on, but I
+HAVE to squeak. But you--of course, No! you mustn't. I'm just a little
+woman. And I ride big horses....”
+
+And for the end she had invented a characteristic little ceremony.
+
+She would stand up in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders
+and look into his face.
+
+“Clean eyes?” she would say, “--still?”
+
+Then she would take his ears in her little firm hands and kiss very
+methodically his eyes and his forehead and his cheeks and at last his
+lips. Her own eyes would suddenly brim bright with tears.
+
+“GO,” she would say.
+
+That was the end.
+
+It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
+fairyland to this grey world again.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The contrast between Lady Marayne's pretty amenities and the good
+woman at Seagate who urged herself almost hourly to forget that William
+Porphyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair. The second Mrs.
+Benham's conscientious spirit and a certain handsome ability about her
+fitted her far more than her predecessor for the onerous duties of a
+schoolmaster's wife, but whatever natural buoyancy she possessed was
+outweighed by an irrepressible conviction derived from an episcopal
+grandparent that the remarriage of divorced persons is sinful, and by a
+secret but well-founded doubt whether her husband loved her with a truly
+romantic passion. She might perhaps have borne either of these troubles
+singly, but the two crushed her spirit.
+
+Her temperament was not one that goes out to meet happiness. She had
+reluctant affections and suspected rather than welcomed the facility
+of other people's. Her susceptibility to disagreeable impressions was
+however very ample, and life was fenced about with protections for her
+“feelings.” It filled young Benham with inexpressible indignations that
+his sweet own mother, so gay, so brightly cheerful that even her tears
+were stars, was never to be mentioned in his stepmother's presence, and
+it was not until he had fully come to years of reflection that he began
+to realize with what honesty, kindness and patience this naturally not
+very happy lady had nursed, protected, mended for and generally mothered
+him.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+As Benham grew to look manly and bear himself with pride, his mother's
+affection for him blossomed into a passion. She made him come down to
+London from Cambridge as often as she could; she went about with him;
+she made him squire her to theatres and take her out to dinners and
+sup with her at the Carlton, and in the summer she had him with her at
+Chexington Manor, the Hertfordshire house Sir Godfrey had given her.
+And always when they parted she looked into his eyes to see if they were
+still clean--whatever she meant by that--and she kissed his forehead and
+cheeks and eyes and lips. She began to make schemes for his career, she
+contrived introductions she judged would be useful to him later.
+
+Everybody found the relationship charming. Some of the more
+conscientious people, it is true, pretended to think that the Reverend
+Harold Benham was a first husband and long since dead, but that was all.
+As a matter of fact, in his increasingly futile way he wasn't, either at
+Seagate or in the Educational Supplement of the TIMES. But even the
+most conscientious of us are not obliged to go to Seagate or read the
+Educational Supplement of the TIMES.
+
+Lady Marayne's plans for her son's future varied very pleasantly. She
+was an industrious reader of biographies, and more particularly of the
+large fair biographies of the recently contemporary; they mentioned
+people she knew, they recalled scenes, each sowed its imaginative crop
+upon her mind, a crop that flourished and flowered until a newer growth
+came to oust it. She saw her son a diplomat, a prancing pro-consul, an
+empire builder, a trusted friend of the august, the bold leader of new
+movements, the saviour of ancient institutions, the youngest, brightest,
+modernest of prime ministers--or a tremendously popular poet. As a rule
+she saw him unmarried--with a wonderful little mother at his elbow.
+Sometimes in romantic flashes he was adored by German princesses
+or eloped with Russian grand-duchesses! But such fancies were HORS
+D'OEUVRE. The modern biography deals with the career. Every project was
+bright, every project had GO--tremendous go. And they all demanded a
+hero, debonnaire and balanced. And Benham, as she began to perceive,
+wasn't balanced. Something of his father had crept into him, a touch
+of moral stiffness. She knew the flavour of that so well. It was a
+stumbling, an elaboration, a spoil-sport and weakness. She tried not to
+admit to herself that even in the faintest degree it was there. But it
+was there.
+
+“Tell me all that you are doing NOW,” she said to him one afternoon when
+she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington Manor.
+“How do you like Cambridge? Are you making friends? Have you joined that
+thing--the Union, is it?--and delivered your maiden speech? If you're
+for politics, Poff, that's your game. Have you begun it?”
+
+She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red cushions in the punt,
+a little curled-up figure of white, with her sweet pale animated face
+warmed by the reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like little
+friendly heavens. And he, lean, and unconsciously graceful, sat at her
+feet and admired her beyond measure, and rejoiced that now at last
+they were going to be ever so much together, and doubted if it would be
+possible ever to love any other woman so much as he did her.
+
+He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the undergraduate
+life he was leading, but he found it difficult. All sorts of things that
+seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of drawing in the
+peculiar atmosphere she created about her. All sorts of clumsiness and
+youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt she wouldn't accept,
+couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her to accept. Before
+they could come before her they must wear a bravery. He couldn't, for
+instance, tell her how Billy Prothero, renouncing vanity and all social
+pretension, had worn a straw hat into November and the last stages of
+decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in
+the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer
+and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into
+the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness
+through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he
+concealed from her. What remained to tell was--attenuated. He could
+not romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to
+inspire a son who seemed most unaccountably up to nothing.
+
+“You must make good friends,” she said. “Isn't young Lord Breeze at
+your college? His mother the other day told me he was. And Sir Freddy
+Quenton's boy. And there are both the young Baptons at Cambridge.”
+
+He knew one of the Baptons.
+
+“Poff,” she said suddenly, “has it ever occurred to you what you are
+going to do afterwards. Do you know you are going to be quite well off?”
+
+Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. “My father said something.
+He was rather vague. It wasn't his affair--that kind of thing.”
+
+“You will be quite well off,” she repeated, without any complicating
+particulars. “You will be so well off that it will be possible for you
+to do anything almost that you like in the world. Nothing will tie you.
+Nothing....”
+
+“But--HOW well off?”
+
+“You will have several thousands a year.”
+
+“Thousands?”
+
+“Yes. Why not?”
+
+“But--Mother, this is rather astounding.... Does this mean there are
+estates somewhere, responsibilities?”
+
+“It is just money. Investments.”
+
+“You know, I've imagined--. I've thought always I should have to DO
+something.”
+
+“You MUST do something, Poff. But it needn't be for a living. The world
+is yours without that. And so you see you've got to make plans. You've
+got to know the sort of people who'll have things in their hands. You've
+got to keep out of--holes and corners. You've got to think of Parliament
+and abroad. There's the army, there's diplomacy. There's the Empire. You
+can be a Cecil Rhodes if you like. You can be a Winston....”
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Perhaps it was only the innate eagerness of Lady Marayne which made
+her feel disappointed in her son's outlook upon life. He did not choose
+among his glittering possibilities, he did not say what he was going to
+be, proconsul, ambassador, statesman, for days. And he talked VAGUELY of
+wanting to do something fine, but all in a fog. A boy of nearly nineteen
+ought to have at least the beginnings of SAVOIR FAIRE.
+
+Was he in the right set? Was he indeed in the right college? Trinity,
+by his account, seemed a huge featureless place--and might he not
+conceivably be LOST in it? In those big crowds one had to insist upon
+oneself. Poff never insisted upon himself--except quite at the wrong
+moment. And there was this Billy 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
+affections of men. So that it is among its foremost distinctions that
+its heart is steeled....”
+
+There this odd fragment ended and White was left to resume the
+interrupted autobiography.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+What moods, what passions, what nights of despair and gathering storms
+of anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are buried
+and hidden and implied in every love story! What a waste is there of
+exquisite things! So each spring sees a million glorious beginnings, a
+sunlit heaven in every opening leaf, warm perfection in every stirring
+egg, hope and fear and beauty beyond computation in every forest tree;
+and in the autumn before the snows come they have all gone, of all
+that incalculable abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure,
+excitement and deliciousness, there is scarcely more to be found than
+a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould or a rotting
+feather....
+
+White held the ten or twelve pencilled pages that told how Benham and
+Amanda drifted into antagonism and estrangement and as he held it he
+thought of the laughter and delight they must have had together, the
+exquisite excitements of her eye, the racing colour of her cheek, the
+gleams of light upon her skin, the flashes of wit between them, the
+sense of discovery, the high rare paths they had followed, the pools in
+which they had swum together. And now it was all gone into nothingness,
+there was nothing left of it, nothing at all, but just those sheets of
+statement, and it may be, stored away in one single mind, like things
+forgotten in an attic, a few neglected faded memories....
+
+And even those few sheets of statement were more than most love leaves
+behind it. For a time White would not read them. They lay neglected on
+his knee as he sat back in Benham's most comfortable chair and enjoyed
+an entirely beautiful melancholy.
+
+White too had seen and mourned the spring.
+
+Indeed, poor dear! he had seen and mourned several springs....
+
+With a sigh he took up the manuscript and read Benham's desiccated story
+of intellectual estrangement, and how in the end he had decided to
+leave his wife and go out alone upon that journey of inquiry he had been
+planning when first he met her.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Amanda had come back to England in a state of extravagantly vigorous
+womanhood. Benham's illness, though it lasted only two or three
+weeks, gave her a sense of power and leadership for which she had been
+struggling instinctively ever since they came together. For a time at
+Locarno he was lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she formed her
+bright and limited plans for London. Benham had no plans as yet but
+only a sense of divergence, as though he was being pulled in opposite
+directions by two irresistible forces. To her it was plain that he
+needed occupation, some distinguished occupation, and she could imagine
+nothing better for him than a political career. She perceived he had
+personality, that he stood out among men so that his very silences were
+effective. She loved him immensely, and she had tremendous ambitions for
+him and through him.
+
+And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with appetite.
+Her soul thirsted for London. It was like some enormous juicy fruit
+waiting for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large enough to give
+her avidity the sense of enough. She felt it waiting for her, household,
+servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly delight of buying and
+possessing things, the opera, first-nights, picture exhibitions, great
+dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties, crowds seen from a point
+of vantage, the carriage in a long string of fine carriages with the
+lamplit multitude peering, Amanda in a thousand bright settings, in a
+thousand various dresses. She had had love; it had been glorious, it
+was still glorious, but her love-making became now at times almost
+perfunctory in the contemplation of these approaching delights and
+splendours and excitements.
+
+She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in Benham's head; but she
+was a realist. She did not see why ideas should stand in the way of a
+career. Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind. One talks
+ideas, but THE THING THAT IS, IS THE THING THAT IS. And though she
+believed that Benham had a certain strength of character of his own, she
+had that sort of confidence in his love for her and in the power of her
+endearments that has in it the assurance of a faint contempt. She had
+mingled pride and sense in the glorious realization of the power over
+him that her wit and beauty gave her. She had held him faint with her
+divinity, intoxicated with the pride of her complete possession, and she
+did not dream that the moment when he should see clearly that she could
+deliberately use these ultimate delights to rule and influence him,
+would be the end of their splendour and her power. Her nature, which
+was just a nest of vigorous appetites, was incapable of suspecting his
+gathering disillusionment until it burst upon her.
+
+Now with her attention set upon London ahead he could observe her.
+In the beginning he had never seemed to be observing her at all, they
+dazzled one another; it seemed extraordinary now to him to note how much
+he had been able to disregard. There were countless times still when he
+would have dropped his observation and resumed that mutual exaltation
+very gladly, but always now other things possessed her mind....
+
+There was still an immense pleasure for him in her vigour; there was
+something delightful in her pounce, even when she was pouncing on things
+superficial, vulgar or destructive. She made him understand and share
+the excitement of a big night at the opera, the glitter and prettiness
+of a smart restaurant, the clustering little acute adventures of a great
+reception of gay people, just as she had already made him understand and
+sympathize with dogs. She picked up the art world where he had laid
+it down, and she forced him to feel dense and slow before he rebelled
+against her multitudinous enthusiasms and admirations. South Harting had
+had its little group of artistic people; it is not one of your sleepy
+villages, and she slipped back at once into the movement. Those were
+the great days of John, the days before the Post Impressionist outbreak.
+John, Orpen, Tonks, she bought them with vigour. Artistic circles began
+to revolve about her. Very rapidly she was in possession.... And among
+other desirable things she had, it seemed, pounced upon and captured
+Lady Marayne.
+
+At any rate it was clear that that awful hostile silence and aloofness
+was to end. Benham never quite mastered how it was done. But Amanda
+had gone in one morning to Desborough Street, very sweetly and
+chastely dressed, had abased herself and announced a possible (though
+subsequently disproved) grandchild. And she had appreciated the little
+lady so highly and openly, she had so instantly caught and reproduced
+her tone, that her success, though only temporary in its completeness,
+was immediate. In the afternoon Benham was amazed by the apparition of
+his mother amidst the scattered unsettled furnishings of the new home
+Amanda had chosen in Lancaster Gate. He was in the hall, the door stood
+open awaiting packing-cases from a van without. In the open doorway she
+shone, looking the smallest of dainty things. There was no effect of her
+coming but only of her having arrived there, as a little blue butterfly
+will suddenly alight on a flower.
+
+“Well, Poff!” said Lady Marayne, ignoring abysses, “What are you up to
+now, Poff? Come and embrace me....”
+
+“No, not so,” she said, “stiffest of sons....”
+
+She laid hold of his ears in the old fashion and kissed one eye.
+
+“Congratulations, dear little Poff. Oh! congratulations! In heaps. I'm
+so GLAD.”
+
+Now what was that for?
+
+And then Amanda came out upon the landing upstairs, saw the encounter
+with an involuntary cry of joy, and came downstairs with arms wide open.
+It was the first intimation he had of their previous meeting. He was for
+some minutes a stunned, entirely inadequate Benham....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a few people in the
+Hampstead Garden suburb that she had not the slightest wish to know, and
+then very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of people. The artistic
+circle brought in people, Lady Marayne brought in people; they spread.
+It was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young couple; he would
+certainly do something considerable presently, and she was bright and
+daring, jolly to look at and excellent fun, and, when you came to talk
+to her, astonishingly well informed. They passed from one hostess's hand
+to another: they reciprocated. The Clynes people and the Rushtones took
+her up; Mr. Evesham was amused by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed
+her charm like a trumpet, the Young Liberal people made jealous
+advances, Lord Moggeridge found she listened well, she lit one of the
+brightest weekend parties Lady Marayne had ever gathered at Chexington.
+And her descriptions of recent danger and adventure in Albania not
+only entertained her hearers but gave her just that flavour of personal
+courage which completes the fascination of a young woman. People in the
+gaps of a halting dinner-table conversation would ask: “Have you met
+Mrs. Benham?”
+
+Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking. A smiling and successful young
+woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl with a
+good lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely engaged, or
+at least friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr. Rathbone-Sanders,
+may be forgiven if in the full tide of her success she does not
+altogether grasp the intention of her husband's discourse. It seemed to
+her that he was obsessed by a responsibility for civilization and the
+idea that he was aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined to doubt
+whether he was justified in calling himself aristocratic; at the best
+his mother was county-stuff; but still if he did there was no great
+harm in it nowadays.) Clearly his line was Tory-Democracy, social reform
+through the House of Lords and friendly intimacy with the more spirited
+young peers. And it was only very slowly and reluctantly that she
+was forced to abandon this satisfactory solution of his problem. She
+reproduced all the equipment and comforts of his Finacue Street study in
+their new home, she declared constantly that she would rather forego
+any old social thing than interfere with his work, she never made him
+go anywhere with her without first asking if his work permitted it. To
+relieve him of the burthen of such social attentions she even made a fag
+or so. The making of fags out of manifestly stricken men, the keeping
+of tamed and hopeless admirers, seemed to her to be the most natural and
+reasonable of feminine privileges. They did their useful little services
+until it pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own. That was how she
+put it....
+
+But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
+ignored. He was manifestly losing his temper with her. There was a
+novel austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face on
+certain occasions that lingered in her memory.
+
+He was indeed making elaborate explanations. He said that what he wanted
+to do was to understand “the collective life of the world,” and that
+this was not to be done in a West-End study. He had an extraordinary
+contempt, it seemed, for both sides in the drama of British politics. He
+had extravagant ideas of beginning in some much more fundamental way.
+He wanted to understand this “collective life of the world,” because
+ultimately he wanted to help control it. (Was there ever such nonsense?)
+The practical side of this was serious enough, however; he was back at
+his old idea of going round the earth. Later on that might be rather
+a jolly thing to do, but not until they had struck root a little more
+surely in London.
+
+And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she began
+to realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon this vague
+extravagant research, that all this work she had been doing to make
+a social place for him in London was as nothing to him, that he was
+thinking of himself as separable from her....
+
+“But, Cheetah! How can you leave your spotless leopard? You would howl
+in the lonely jungle!”
+
+“Possibly I shall. But I am going.”
+
+“Then I shall come.”
+
+“No.” He considered her reasons. “You see you are not interested.”
+
+“But I am.”
+
+“Not as I am. You would turn it all into a jolly holiday. You don't want
+to see things as I want to do. You want romance. All the world is a show
+for you. As a show I can't endure it. I want to lay hands on it.”
+
+“But, Cheetah!” she said, “this is separation.”
+
+“You will have your life here. And I shall come back.”
+
+“But, Cheetah! How can we be separated?”
+
+“We are separated,” he said.
+
+Her eyes became round with astonishment. Then her face puckered.
+
+“Cheetah!” she cried in a voice of soft distress, “I love you. What do
+you mean?”
+
+And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and
+shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+“Don't say we are separated,” she whispered, putting her still wet face
+close to his.
+
+“No. We're mates,” he answered softly, with his arm about her.
+
+“How could we ever keep away from each uvver?” she whispered.
+
+He was silent.
+
+“How COULD we?”
+
+He answered aloud. “Amanda,” he said, “I mean to go round the world.”
+
+She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.
+
+“What is to become of me,” she asked suddenly in a voice of despair,
+“while you go round the world? If you desert me in London,” she said,
+“if you shame me by deserting me in London-- If you leave me, I will
+never forgive you, Cheetah! Never.” Then in an almost breathless voice,
+and as if she spoke to herself, “Never in all my days.”
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children. There was
+nothing involuntary about Amanda. “Soon,” she said, “we must begin to
+think of children. Not just now, but a little later. It's good to travel
+and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are children in the
+background. No woman is really content until she is a mother....” And
+for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said about that solitary journey
+round the world.
+
+But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk. She set
+herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there
+were other men in the world. The convenient fags, sometimes a little
+embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought into the
+light before Benham's eyes. Most of them were much older men than
+himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no sane man need
+be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a contemporary, Sir
+Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood and a suggestion of
+Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much in love with Amanda and
+of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible difference of manner that
+made Benham faintly uneasy. He was ashamed of the feeling. Easton it
+seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine honour, so that Amanda could trust
+herself with him to an extent that would have been inadvisable with men
+of a commoner substance, and he had a gift of understanding and sympathy
+that was almost feminine; he could cheer one up when one was lonely and
+despondent. For Amanda was so methodical in the arrangement of her time
+that even in the full rush of a London season she could find an hour
+now and then for being lonely and despondent. And he was a liberal and
+understanding purchaser of the ascendant painters; he understood
+that side of Amanda's interests, a side upon which Benham was notably
+deficient....
+
+“Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?--Sir Philip
+Easton?” said Lady Marayne.
+
+Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said
+nothing.
+
+“When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her,” said Lady Marayne.
+
+“No,” said Benham after consideration. “I don't intend to be a
+wife-herd.”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Wife-herd--same as goat-herd.”
+
+“Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff--nowadays.”
+
+“It's exactly what I mean. I can understand the kind of curator's
+interest an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but
+to spend my days looking after one person who ought to be able to look
+after herself--”
+
+“She's very young.”
+
+“She's quite grown up. Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid.”
+
+“If you leave her about and go abroad--”
+
+“Has she been talking to you, mother?”
+
+“The thing shows.”
+
+“But about my going abroad?”
+
+“She said something, my little Poff.”
+
+Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference
+was something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking
+inordinately. He weighed his words before he spoke again. “If Amanda
+chooses to threaten me with a sort of conditional infidelity, I don't
+see that it ought to change the plans I have made for my life....”
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+“No aristocrat has any right to be jealous,” Benham wrote. “If he
+chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or
+naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel
+her to go his way. What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion
+through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the
+use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no inherent will to
+seek and live the aristocratic life?
+
+“But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call....”
+
+He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
+Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of her,
+the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly
+resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of thinking her
+over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been
+preoccupied with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a
+sense of extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her,
+of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone
+conclusions. He was ready now even with the details of his project. She
+should go on with her life in London exactly as she had planned it. He
+would take fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might
+spend without check or stint as it pleased her. He was going round the
+world for one or two years. It was even possible he would not go alone.
+There was a man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don
+called Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out
+his ideas....
+
+To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should
+happen.
+
+She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily
+told her that this only hardened his heart. She perceived that she must
+make a softer appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive and
+imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the
+first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to
+bear a child. “He cannot go if I am going to have a child,” she told
+herself. But that would mean illness, and for illness in herself or
+others Amanda had the intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet even
+illness would be better than this intolerable publication of her
+husband's ability to leave her side....
+
+She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith
+to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him. Her
+dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “I want to have children, but I must go round the world
+none the less.”
+
+She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind. She
+argued with persistence and repetition. And then suddenly so that she
+was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.
+
+She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and she
+was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-forgetful;
+she was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale green, that set off
+her slim erect body and the strong clear lines of her neck and shoulders
+very beautifully, some greenish stones caught a light from without and
+flashed soft whispering gleams from amidst the misty darkness of her
+hair. She was going to Lady Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for
+a dinner at the House with some young Liberals at which he was to meet
+two representative Indians with a grievance from Bengal. Husband and
+wife had but a few moments together. She asked about his company and he
+told her.
+
+“They will tell you about India.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She stood for a moment looking out across the lights and the dark green
+trees, and then she turned to him.
+
+“Why cannot I come with you?” she asked with sudden passion. “Why cannot
+I see the things you want to see?”
+
+“I tell you you are not interested. You would only be interested through
+me. That would not help me. I should just be dealing out my premature
+ideas to you. If you cared as I care, if you wanted to know as I want to
+know, it would be different. But you don't. It isn't your fault that
+you don't. It happens so. And there is no good in forced interest, in
+prescribed discovery.”
+
+“Cheetah,” she asked, “what is it that you want to know--that I don't
+care for?”
+
+“I want to know about the world. I want to rule the world.”
+
+“So do I.”
+
+“No, you want to have the world.”
+
+“Isn't it the same?”
+
+“No. You're a greedier thing than I am, you Black Leopard you--standing
+there in the dusk. You're a stronger thing. Don't you know you're
+stronger? When I am with you, you carry your point, because you are more
+concentrated, more definite, less scrupulous. When you run beside me
+you push me out of my path.... You've made me afraid of you.... And so
+I won't go with you, Leopard. I go alone. It isn't because I don't love
+you. I love you too well. It isn't because you aren't beautiful and
+wonderful....”
+
+“But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for this that you want than
+you care for me.”
+
+Benham thought of it. “I suppose I do,” he said.
+
+“What is it that you want? Still I don't understand.”
+
+Her voice had the break of one who would keep reasonable in spite of
+pain.
+
+“I ought to tell you.”
+
+“Yes, you ought to tell me.”
+
+“I wonder if I can tell you,” he said very thoughtfully, and rested his
+hands on his hips. “I shall seem ridiculous to you.”
+
+“You ought to tell me.”
+
+“I think what I want is to be king of the world.”
+
+She stood quite still staring at him.
+
+“I do not know how I can tell you of it. Amanda, do you remember those
+bodies--you saw those bodies--those mutilated men?”
+
+“I saw them,” said Amanda.
+
+“Well. Is it nothing to you that those things happen?”
+
+“They must happen.”
+
+“No. They happen because there are no kings but pitiful kings. They
+happen because the kings love their Amandas and do not care.”
+
+“But what can YOU do, Cheetah?”
+
+“Very little. But I can give my life and all my strength. I can give all
+I can give.”
+
+“But how? How can you help it--help things like that massacre?”
+
+“I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong with my world and rule it
+and set it right.”
+
+“YOU! Alone.”
+
+“Other men do as much. Every one who does so helps others to do so. You
+see--... In this world one may wake in the night and one may resolve to
+be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king. Does that sound
+foolishness to you? Anyhow, it's fair that I should tell you, though
+you count me a fool. This--this kingship--this dream of the night--is
+my life. It is the very core of me. Much more than you are. More than
+anything else can be. I mean to be a king in this earth. KING. I'm not
+mad.... I see the world staggering from misery to misery and there is
+little wisdom, less rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things
+come by chance and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my
+world and I am responsible. Every man to whom this light has come
+is responsible. As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your
+kingship is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no delight,
+except in work, in service, in utmost effort. As far as I can do it I
+will rule my world. I cannot abide in this smug city, I cannot
+endure its self-complacency, its routine, its gloss of success, its
+rottenness.... I shall do little, perhaps I shall do nothing, but what I
+can understand and what I can do I will do. Think of that wild beautiful
+country we saw, and the mean misery, the filth and the warring cruelty
+of the life that lives there, tragedy, tragedy without dignity; and
+think, too, of the limitless ugliness here, and of Russia slipping
+from disorder to massacre, and China, that sea of human beings,
+sliding steadily to disaster. Do you think these are only things in the
+newspapers? To me at any rate they are not things in newspapers; they
+are pain and failure, they are torment, they are blood and dust and
+misery. They haunt me day and night. Even if it is utterly absurd I will
+still do my utmost. It IS absurd. I'm a madman and you and my mother
+are sensible people.... And I will go my way.... I don't care for the
+absurdity. I don't care a rap.”
+
+He stopped abruptly.
+
+“There you have it, Amanda. It's rant, perhaps. Sometimes I feel it's
+rant. And yet it's the breath of life to me.... There you are.... At
+last I've been able to break silence and tell you....”
+
+He stopped with something like a sob and stood regarding the dusky
+mystery of her face. She stood quite still, she was just a beautiful
+outline in the twilight, her face was an indistinctness under the black
+shadow of her hair, with eyes that were two patches of darkness.
+
+He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the time.
+His voice changed. “Well--if you provoke a man enough, you see he makes
+speeches. Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda. Here we are talking instead
+of going to our dinners. The car has been waiting ten minutes.”
+
+Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas....
+
+A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly. In an instant she
+had ceased to plot against him. A vast wave of emotion swept her forward
+to a resolution that astonished her.
+
+“Cheetah!” she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed,
+“give me one thing. Stay until June with me.”
+
+“Why?” he asked.
+
+Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.
+
+“Because--now--no, I don't want to keep you any more--I am not trying to
+hold you any more.... I want....”
+
+She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.
+
+“Cheetah,” she whispered almost inaudibly, “Cheetah--I didn't
+understand. But now--. I want to bear your child.”
+
+He was astonished. “Old Leopard!” he said.
+
+“No,” she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing
+very close to him, “Queen---if I can be--to your King.”
+
+“You want to bear me a child!” he whispered, profoundly moved.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of Commons
+came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer. And over against
+Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of those men who
+know that their judgments are quoted.
+
+“Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?” he asked of
+his neighbour in confidential undertones....
+
+He tittered. “I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY aware
+that the man to her left is talking to her....”
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was now a
+fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer....
+
+All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in
+some way Prothero was necessary to his mind. It was as if he looked to
+Prothero to keep him real. He suspected even while he obeyed that upward
+flourish which was his own essential characteristic. He had a peculiar
+feeling that somehow that upward bias would betray him; that from
+exaltation he might presently float off, into the higher, the better,
+and so to complete unreality. He fled from priggishness and the terror
+of such sublimity alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation to so many
+things Prothero in a peculiar distinctive manner SAW. He had less
+self-control than Benham, less integrity of purpose, less concentration,
+and things that were before his eyes were by the very virtue of these
+defects invariably visible to him. Things were able to insist upon
+themselves with him. Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted
+his purpose too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them. He
+repudiated inconvenient facts. He mastered and made his world; Prothero
+accepted and recorded his. Benham was a will towards the universe where
+Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive activity.
+And it was because of his realization of this profound difference
+between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking Prothero with
+him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision--rather like that
+eye the Graiae used to hand one another....
+
+After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms in
+Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue
+sky, seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholarship pervaded them--a
+little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not
+completely forgotten. Prothero's door had been locked against the world,
+and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only
+apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better
+part of a second. He might have been asleep, he might have been doing
+anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men
+exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before
+Benham' s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host
+to the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects
+of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the
+distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red,
+incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an
+air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE, its cover
+proclaimed....
+
+His host followed that glance and blushed. “They send me all sorts of
+inappropriate stuff to review,” he remarked.
+
+And then he was denouncing celibacy.
+
+The transition wasn't very clear to Benham. His mind had been
+preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project.
+Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between his
+teeth and bolted. He began to say the most shocking things right away,
+so that Benham's attention was caught in spite of himself.
+
+“Inflammatory classics.”
+
+“What's that?”
+
+“Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me,” said Prothero. “I can't
+stand it any longer.”
+
+It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world,
+such a statement might have been credible. Even in his own life,--it was
+now indeed a remote, forgotten stage--there had been something distantly
+akin....
+
+“You're going to marry?”
+
+“I must.”
+
+“Who's the lady, Billy?”
+
+“I don't know. Venus.”
+
+His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly. “So far as I know,
+it is Venus Anadyomene.” A flash of laughter passed across his face
+and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. “I like her
+best, anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! I feel that almost any of them--”
+
+“Tut, tut!” said Benham.
+
+Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.
+
+“Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face? I
+am not pronouncing an immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. I
+am telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I feel. I want--Venus.
+I don't want her to talk to or anything of that sort.... I have been
+studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning,
+instead of doing any work. Would you like to see it?... NO!...
+
+“This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad. It is a peculiarly
+erotic spring. I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend
+to ordinary conversation. These feelings, I understand, are by no means
+peculiar to myself.... No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now
+that the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in you said, 'How
+are you?' I am telling you how I am. You brought it on yourself. Well--I
+am--inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious convictions to assist
+me either to endure or deny this--this urgency. And so why should I deny
+it? It's one of our chief problems here. The majority of my fellow
+dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and
+combination-room are in just the same case as myself. The fever in
+oneself detects the fever in others. I know their hidden thoughts. Their
+fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts. Each covers his
+miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference. A
+tattered cloak.... Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible
+vice of continence--”
+
+“Billy, what's the matter with you?”
+
+Prothero grimaced impatience. “Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a
+humbug, Benham?” he screamed, and in screaming became calmer. “Nature
+taunts me, maddens me. My life is becoming a hell of shame. 'Get out
+from all these books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.' The Flesh,
+Benham. Yes--I insist--the Flesh. Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any
+man a pure spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage,
+with too much port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked
+Aspasia.”
+
+“Mutual, perhaps, Billy.”
+
+“Oh! you can sneer!”
+
+“Well, clearly--Saint Paul is my authority--it's marriage, Billy.”
+
+Prothero had walked to the window. He turned round.
+
+“I CAN'T marry,” he said. “The trouble has gone too far. I've lost my
+nerve in the presence of women. I don't like them any more. They come
+at one--done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about
+all sorts of things that don't matter....” He surveyed his friend's
+thoughtful attitude. “I'm getting to hate women, Benham. I'm beginning
+now to understand the bitterness of spinsters against men. I'm beginning
+to grasp the unkindliness of priests. The perpetual denial. To you,
+happily married, a woman is just a human being. You can talk to her,
+like her, you can even admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge
+against her....”
+
+He sat down abruptly.
+
+Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered him.
+
+“Billy! this is delusion,” he said. “What's come over you?”
+
+“I'm telling you,” said Prothero.
+
+“No,” said Benham.
+
+Prothero awaited some further utterance.
+
+“I'm looking for the cause of it. It's feeding, Billy. It's port and
+stimulants where there is no scope for action. It's idleness. I begin to
+see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser.”
+
+“Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers. Look at that filing
+system like an arsenal of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow
+not idleness.”
+
+“There's still bodily idleness. No. That's your trouble. You're stuffy.
+You've enlarged your liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning after
+an extravagant breakfast--. And peep and covet.”
+
+“Just eggs and bacon!”
+
+“Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. Come out of it, Billy,
+and get aired.”
+
+“How can one?”
+
+“Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!”
+
+“It's an infernally warm morning.
+
+“Walk with me to Grantchester.”
+
+“We might go by boat. You could row.”
+
+“WALK.”
+
+“I ought to do these papers.”
+
+“You weren't doing them.”
+
+“No....”
+
+“Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours
+is--horrid--and just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come
+with me to Russia and about the world. I'm going to leave my wife--”
+
+“Leave your wife!”
+
+“Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead
+you are in this disgusting state. I've never met anything in my life so
+hot and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one
+talk to you?”
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+“You pull things down to your own level,” said Benham as they went
+through the heat to Grantchester.
+
+“I pull them down to truth,” panted Prothero.
+
+“Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and
+discipline and training some sort of falsity!”
+
+“Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride.”
+
+For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....
+
+The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the
+background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
+
+“I'm not talking of Love,” he said, remaining persistently outrageous.
+“I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of
+arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is
+physically possible....
+
+“But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?”
+
+“Then why don't we up and find out?” said Billy.
+
+He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that
+surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came
+to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our
+indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with
+awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in
+particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to
+traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? “What is the wisdom
+of the ages?” said Prothero. “Think of the corners where that wisdom was
+born.... Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise
+man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab
+epileptic....”
+
+“Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?” protested Benham.
+
+The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter
+experience. Most of it was better forgotten. It didn't convince. It had
+never worked things out. In this matter just as in every other matter
+that really signified things had still to be worked out. Nothing had
+been worked out hitherto. The wisdom of the ages was a Cant. People had
+been too busy quarrelling, fighting and running away. There wasn't
+any digested experience of the ages at all. Only the mis-remembered
+hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man.
+
+“Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or
+isn't it?” Prothero demanded. “There's a simple question enough, and is
+there anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages to tell
+me yes or no? Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and vigorous as a
+mated man? Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being? Can she
+be? I don't believe so. Then why in thunder do we let her be? Here am I
+at a centre of learning and wisdom and I don't believe so; and there is
+nothing in all our colleges, libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here,
+to settle that plain question for me, plainly and finally. My life is a
+grubby torment of cravings because it isn't settled. If sexual activity
+IS a part of the balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set
+about making it accessible and harmless and have done with it. Swedish
+exercises. That sort of thing. If it isn't, if it can be reduced and
+done without, then let us set about teaching people HOW to control
+themselves and reduce and get rid of this vehement passion. But all this
+muffled mystery, this pompous sneak's way we take with it!”
+
+“But, Billy! How can one settle these things? It's a matter of
+idiosyncrasy. What is true for one man isn't true for another. There's
+infinite difference of temperaments!”
+
+“Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral code
+for each sort? Why am I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for
+Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like a glove? It isn't
+convenient for me. It fits me like a hair-shirt. Of course there
+are temperaments, but why can't we formulate them and exercise the
+elementary charity of recognizing that one man's health in these matters
+is another man's death? Some want love and gratification and some don't.
+There are people who want children and people who don't want to be
+bothered by children but who are full of vivid desires. There are
+people whose only happiness is chastity, and women who would rather
+be courtesans than mothers. Some of us would concentrate upon a
+single passion or a single idea; others overflow with a
+miscellaneous--tenderness. Yes,--and you smile! Why spit upon and insult
+a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin at it? Why try every one
+by the standards that suit oneself? We're savages, Benham, shamefaced
+savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting.
+
+“I was angry about sex by seventeen,” he went on. “Every year I live I
+grow angrier.”
+
+His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
+
+“Think,” he said, “of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex
+that is going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these
+thousands full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it
+together; we work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and
+casual stories, patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders,
+disease, trouble, escapes; and the next generation will start, and the
+next generation after that will start with nothing but your wisdom of
+the ages, which isn't wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos
+and mystery and the secretive cunning of the savage....
+
+“What I really want to do is my work,” said Prothero, going off quite
+unexpectedly again. “That is why all this business, this incessant
+craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry....”
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+“There I'm with you,” cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent
+of Prothero's prepossessions. “What we want to do is our work.”
+
+He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting
+the word again.
+
+“It's this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--living
+the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of
+this business. If it was only submission.... YOU think it is only
+submission--giving way.... It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all
+right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't
+know all the time that there was something else to live for,
+something far more important. And different. Absolutely different
+and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these
+considerations. It won't fit in.... I don't know what this other thing
+is; it's what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS, in
+all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands control, it demands continence,
+it insists upon disregard.”
+
+But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to
+Prothero that day.
+
+“Mankind,” said Benham, “is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates
+us. It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent
+necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as
+being married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love
+story....”
+
+“Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied,” said Prothero,
+sticking stoutly to his own view.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester
+after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and
+recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the
+imagination of Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero's
+troubles as soar over them. It is the last triumph of the human
+understanding to sympathize with desires we do not share, and to Benham
+who now believed himself to be loved beyond the chances of life, who
+was satisfied and tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible
+that Prothero's demands should seem anything more than the grotesque and
+squalid squealings of the beast that has to be overridden and rejected
+altogether. It is a freakish fact of our composition that these most
+intense feelings in life are just those that are most rapidly and
+completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years, but the magic
+of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives and
+vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was still not
+a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale,
+and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its
+sty....
+
+What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at last he
+could sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the project
+that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.
+
+He had discovered a new reason for travelling. The last country we can
+see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country. It is as hard to see
+one's own country as it is to see the back of one's head. It is too
+much behind us, too much ourselves. But Russia is like England with
+everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked
+about St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage
+untamed London on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal
+cities, like no other capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings
+mingled in their effects. Like London it looked over the heads of
+its own people to a limitless polyglot empire. And Russia was an
+aristocratic land, with a middle-class that had no pride in itself as a
+class; it had a British toughness and incompetence, a British disregard
+of logic and meticulous care. Russia, like England, was outside Catholic
+Christendom, it had a state church and the opposition to that church was
+not secularism but dissent. One could draw a score of such contrasted
+parallels. And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid
+bare the elemental facts of a great social organization. It was having
+its South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a
+certain defeat instead of a dubious victory....
+
+“There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in
+England,” said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.
+
+Benham went on with his discourse about Russia....
+
+“At the college of Troitzka,” said Prothero, “which I understand is a
+kind of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me
+that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the
+arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are
+conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality.”
+
+Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.
+
+He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation.
+He led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try
+to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty
+of every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much. And so he
+was going, and if Prothero cared to come too--
+
+“Yes,” said Prothero, “I should like to go to Russia.”
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was never
+able to lift Prothero away from his obsession. It was the substance of
+their talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting destroyers and
+winking beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the smoothly undulating
+darkness of the North Sea; it rose upon them again as they sat over
+the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in the express for Berlin.
+Prothero filled the Sieges Allee with his complaints against nature
+and society, and distracted Benham in his contemplation of Polish
+agriculture from the windows of the train with turgid sexual liberalism.
+So that Benham, during this period until Prothero left him and until
+the tragic enormous spectacle of Russia in revolution took complete
+possession of him, was as it were thinking upon two floors. Upon the one
+he was thinking of the vast problems of a society of a hundred million
+people staggering on the verge of anarchy, and upon the other he was
+perplexed by the feverish inattention of Prothero to the tremendous
+things that were going on all about them. It was only presently when the
+serenity of his own private life began to be ruffled by disillusionment,
+that he began to realize the intimate connexion of these two systems of
+thought. Yet Prothero put it to him plainly enough.
+
+“Inattentive,” said Prothero, “of course I am inattentive. What is
+really the matter with all this--this social mess people are in here, is
+that nearly everybody is inattentive. These Big Things of yours, nobody
+is thinking of them really. Everybody is thinking about the Near Things
+that concern himself.”
+
+“The bombs they threw yesterday? The Cossacks and the whips?”
+
+“Nudges. Gestures of inattention. If everybody was thinking of the Res
+Publica would there be any need for bombs?”
+
+He pursued his advantage. “It's all nonsense to suppose people think of
+politics because they are in 'em. As well suppose that the passengers on
+a liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war. Before men can
+think of to-morrow, they must think of to-day. Before they can think
+of others, they must be sure about themselves. First of all, food; the
+private, the personal economic worry. Am I safe for food? Then sex, and
+until one is tranquil and not ashamed, not irritated and dissatisfied,
+how can one care for other people, or for next year or the Order of the
+World? How can one, Benham?”
+
+He seized the illustration at hand. “Here we are in Warsaw--not a month
+after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging. Windows have still to be
+mended, smashed doors restored. There's blood-stains still on some
+of the houses. There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and in the
+Ochrana prison. This morning there were executions. Is it anything more
+than an eddy in the real life of the place? Watch the customers in the
+shops, the crowd in the streets, the men in the cafes who stare at the
+passing women. They are all swallowed up again in their own business.
+They just looked up as the Cossacks galloped past; they just shifted a
+bit when the bullets spat....”
+
+And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing
+adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide of
+the private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him back to
+Cambridge--changed.
+
+Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
+disregard Prothero. He was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble
+of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the hurrying
+darknesses of an approaching storm. In those days it looked as though it
+must be an overwhelming storm. He was drinking in the wide and massive
+Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the entangling streets, the
+houses with their strange lettering in black and gold, the innumerable
+barbaric churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the sombre red fortress
+of the Kremlin, with its bulbous churches clustering up into the sky,
+the crosses, the innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil,
+carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of permissible caricature,
+and in this setting the obscure drama of clustering, staring,
+sash-wearing peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand
+varieties of uniform, a running and galloping to and fro of messengers,
+a flutter of little papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and
+portentous, a gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on
+to a perpetual clash and clamour of bells. Benham had brought letters of
+introduction to a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed. They
+were “away,” the porters said, and they continued to be “away,”--it was
+the formula, he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few showed
+themselves extraordinarily anxious to inform him about things, to
+explain themselves and things about them exhaustively. One young student
+took him to various meetings and showed him in great detail the scene of
+the recent murder of the Grand Duke Sergius. The buildings opposite the
+old French cannons were still under repair. “The assassin stood just
+here. The bomb fell there, look! right down there towards the gate; that
+was where they found his arm. He was torn to fragments. He was scraped
+up. He was mixed with the horses....”
+
+Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter of
+days or at the utmost weeks. And whatever question Benham chose to
+ask these talkers were prepared to answer. Except one. “And after the
+revolution,” he asked, “what then?...” Then they waved their hands, and
+failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.
+
+He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous drift
+towards a conflict. He was trying to piece together a process, if it
+was one and the same process, which involved riots in Lodz, fighting at
+Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal battlings in Manchuria,
+the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in the
+Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was trying to rationalize
+it all in his mind, to comprehend its direction. He was struggling
+strenuously with the obscurities of the language in which these things
+were being discussed about him, a most difficult language demanding new
+sets of visual images because of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder
+that for a time he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some
+entirely disconnected affair.
+
+They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre Square.
+Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-looking men
+with peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's friends and
+guides to take him out and show him this and that. At first Prothero
+always accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then he began to make
+excuses. He would stay behind in the hotel. Then when Benham returned
+Prothero would have disappeared. When the porter was questioned about
+Prothero his nescience was profound.
+
+One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who
+wanted to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was
+alarmed.
+
+“Moscow is a late place,” said Benham's student friend. “You need not
+be anxious until after four or five in the morning. It will be quite
+time--QUITE time to be anxious to-morrow. He may be--close at hand.”
+
+When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him
+sleepy and irritable.
+
+“I don't trouble if YOU are late,” said Prothero, sitting up in his bed
+with a red resentful face and crumpled hair. “I wasn't born yesterday.”
+
+“I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow.”
+
+“I don't want to leave Moscow.”
+
+“But Odessa--Odessa is the centre of interest just now.”
+
+“I want to stay in Moscow.”
+
+Benham looked baffled.
+
+Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon them.
+“I don't want to leave Moscow,” he said, “and I'm not going to do so.”
+
+“But haven't we done--”
+
+Prothero interrupted. “You may. But I haven't. We're not after the
+same things. Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest me. I've
+found--different things.”
+
+His expression was extraordinarily defiant.
+
+“I want,” he went on, “to put our affairs on a different footing. Now
+you've opened the matter we may as well go into it. You were good enough
+to bring me here.... There was a sort of understanding we were working
+together.... We aren't.... The long and short of it is, Benham, I want
+to pay you for my journey here and go on my own--independently.”
+
+His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly
+incredible in him.
+
+Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters
+jerked back into Benham's memory. It popped back so suddenly that for an
+instant he wanted to laugh. He turned towards the window, picked his
+way among Prothero's carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment
+staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing
+fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS. Then he
+turned.
+
+“Billy,” he said, “didn't I see you the other evening driving towards
+the Hermitage?”
+
+“Yes,” said Prothero, and added, “that's it.”
+
+“You were with a lady.”
+
+“And she IS a lady,” said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face
+twitched as though he was going to weep.
+
+“She's a Russian?”
+
+“She had an English mother. Oh, you needn't stand there and look so
+damned ironical! She's--she's a woman. She's a thing of kindness....”
+
+He was too full to go on.
+
+“Billy, old boy,” said Benham, distressed, “I don't want to be
+ironical--”
+
+Prothero had got his voice again.
+
+“You'd better know,” he said, “you'd better know. She's one of those
+women who live in this hotel.”
+
+“Live in this hotel!”
+
+“On the fourth floor. Didn't you know? It's the way in most of these big
+Russian hotels. They come down and sit about after lunch and dinner. A
+woman with a yellow ticket. Oh! I don't care. I don't care a rap. She's
+been kind to me; she's--she's dear to me. How are you to understand? I
+shall stop in Moscow. I shall take her to England. I can't live without
+her, Benham. And then-- And then you come worrying me to come to your
+damned Odessa!”
+
+And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face
+as though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an
+apoplectic moment burst noisily into tears. They ran between his
+fingers. “Get out of my room,” he shouted, suffocatingly. “What business
+have you to come prying on me?”
+
+Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared
+round-eyed at his friend. His hands were in his pockets. For a time he
+said nothing.
+
+“Billy,” he began at last, and stopped again. “Billy, in this country
+somehow one wants to talk like a Russian. Billy, my dear--I'm not your
+father, I'm not your judge. I'm--unreasonably fond of you. It's not my
+business to settle what is right or wrong for you. If you want to stay
+in Moscow, stay in Moscow. Stay here, and stay as my guest....”
+
+He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.
+
+“I didn't know,” said Prothero brokenly; “I didn't know it was possible
+to get so fond of a person....”
+
+Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
+abominable in his life before.
+
+“I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I'll make things all right here
+before I go....”
+
+He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound thought to
+his own room....
+
+Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to
+explain what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about the
+room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.
+
+In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to have
+shrunken to something sleek and small.
+
+“I wish,” he said, “you could stay for a later train and have lunch and
+meet her. She's not the ordinary thing. She's--different.”
+
+Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. “Billy,” he said, “no woman IS the
+ordinary thing. They are all--different....”
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as
+disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any
+matter to be. While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and travelled
+hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in the endless
+tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero
+was lost to all those large issues in the development of his personal
+situation. He contributed nothing to Benham's thought except attempts at
+discouragement. He reiterated his declaration that all the vast
+stress and change of Russian national life was going on because it was
+universally disregarded. “I tell you, as I told you before, that nobody
+is attending. You think because all Moscow, all Russia, is in the
+picture, that everybody is concerned. Nobody is concerned. Nobody cares
+what is happening. Even the men who write in newspapers and talk at
+meetings about it don't care. They are thinking of their dinners, of
+their clothes, of their money, of their wives. They hurry home....”
+
+That was his excuse.
+
+Manifestly it was an excuse.
+
+His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy and
+divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible. To
+Benham in those days everything was very simple in this business of
+love. The aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all. He had to love
+Amanda. He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in
+love, he felt, than they had ever been before. They were now writing
+love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation that was almost
+voluptuous. She found in the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to
+him and to the natural fate of women, a delightful exercise for her very
+considerable powers of expression. Life pointed now wonderfully to the
+great time ahead when there would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and
+meanwhile the Cheetah loped about the wild world upon a mighty quest. In
+such terms she put it. Such foolishness written in her invincibly square
+and youthful hand went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up
+against his return in the porter's office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or
+pursued him down through the jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or
+waited for him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his journeyings
+wastefully or in several instances went altogether astray. Perhaps they
+supplied self-educating young strikers in the postal service with useful
+exercises in the deciphering of manuscript English. He wrote back five
+hundred different ways of saying that he loved her extravagantly....
+
+It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and
+solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world;
+Heroic Love to its highest note--and then you go about your business. It
+seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin high and diffuse
+a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate multitudes who stewed in
+affliction and hate because they had failed as yet to find this simple,
+culminating elucidation. And Prothero--Prothero, too, was now achieving
+the same grand elementariness, out of his lusts and protests and general
+physical squalor he had flowered into love. For a time it is true it
+made rather an ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere
+goose-stepping for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay
+exaltation. Benham had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this
+Anglo-Russian, who was a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had
+seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him,
+and his impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with
+dusky hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her,
+a quiet alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda. And
+if she liked old Prothero-- And, indeed, she must like old Prothero or
+could she possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?
+
+They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero's soul
+would wake up and face the world again. What did it matter what she had
+been?
+
+Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained anxiety
+and the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering towards
+revolution, Benham went with his own love like a lamp within him
+and this affair of Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was quite
+prepared for the most sympathetic and liberal behaviour when he came
+back to Moscow to make the lady's acquaintance. He intended to help
+Prothero to marry and take her back to Cambridge, and to assist by every
+possible means in destroying and forgetting the official yellow ticket
+that defined her status in Moscow. But he reckoned without either
+Prothero or the young lady in this expectation.
+
+It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations
+that there were obscure obstacles to this manifest course. Prothero
+hesitated; the lady expressed doubts.
+
+On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished. It was
+chiefly a similarity of complexion. She had a more delicate face than
+Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none of
+Amanda's glow, and she spoke her mother's language with a pretty halting
+limp that was very different from Amanda's clear decisions.
+
+She put her case compactly.
+
+“I would not DO in Cambridge,” she said with an infinitesimal glance at
+Prothero.
+
+“Mr. Benham,” she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman
+of affairs, “now do you see me in Cambridge? Now do you see me? Kept
+outside the walls? In a little DATCHA? With no occupation? Just to amuse
+him.”
+
+And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved
+still completer lucidity.
+
+“I would come if I thought he wanted me to come,” she said. “But you see
+if I came he would not want me to come. Because then he would have me
+and so he wouldn't want me. He would just have the trouble. And I am not
+sure if I should be happy in Cambridge. I am not sure I should be happy
+enough to make him happy. It is a very learned and intelligent and
+charming society, of course; but here, THINGS HAPPEN. At Cambridge
+nothing happens--there is only education. There is no revolution in
+Cambridge; there are not even sinful people to be sorry for.... And
+he says himself that Cambridge people are particular. He says they are
+liberal but very, very particular, and perhaps I could not always act my
+part well. Sometimes I am not always well behaved. When there is music I
+behave badly sometimes, or when I am bored. He says the Cambridge people
+are so liberal that they do not mind what you are, but he says they are
+so particular that they mind dreadfully how you are what you are.... So
+that it comes to exactly the same thing....”
+
+“Anna Alexievna,” said Benham suddenly, “are you in love with Prothero?”
+
+Her manner became conscientiously scientific.
+
+“He is very kind and very generous--too generous. He keeps sending for
+more money--hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him.”
+
+“Were you EVER in love?”
+
+“Of course. But it's all gone long ago. It was like being hungry. Only
+very fine hungry. Exquisite hungry.... And then being disgusted....”
+
+“He is in love with you.”
+
+“What is love?” said Anna. “He is grateful. He is by nature grateful.”
+ She smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who looks down on
+her bambino.
+
+“And you love nothing?”
+
+“I love Russia--and being alone, being completely alone. When I am dead
+perhaps I shall be alone. Not even my own body will touch me then.”
+
+Then she added, “But I shall be sorry when he goes.”
+
+Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone. “Your Anna,” he said, “is
+rather wonderful. At first, I tell you now frankly I did not like her
+very much, I thought she looked 'used,' she drank vodka at lunch, she
+was gay, uneasily; she seemed a sham thing. All that was prejudice. She
+thinks; she's generous, she's fine.”
+
+“She's tragic,” said Prothero as though it was the same thing.
+
+He spoke as though he noted an objection. His next remark confirmed this
+impression. “That's why I can't take her back to Cambridge,” he said.
+
+“You see, Benham,” he went on, “she's human. She's not really feminine.
+I mean, she's--unsexed. She isn't fitted to be a wife or a mother any
+more. We've talked about the possible life in England, very plainly.
+I've explained what a household in Cambridge would mean.... It doesn't
+attract her.... In a way she's been let out from womanhood, forced out
+of womanhood, and I see now that when women are let out from womanhood
+there's no putting them back. I could give a lecture on Anna. I see
+now that if women are going to be wives and mothers and homekeepers and
+ladies, they must be got ready for it from the beginning, sheltered,
+never really let out into the wild chances of life. She has been.
+Bitterly. She's REALLY emancipated. And it's let her out into a sort of
+nothingness. She's no longer a woman, and she isn't a man. She ought
+to be able to go on her own--like a man. But I can't take her back to
+Cambridge. Even for her sake.”
+
+His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.
+
+“You won't be happy in Cambridge--alone,” said Benham.
+
+“Oh, damnably not! But what can I do? I had at first some idea of coming
+to Moscow for good--teaching.”
+
+He paused. “Impossible. I'm worth nothing here. I couldn't have kept
+her.”
+
+“Then what are you going to do, Billy?”
+
+“I don't KNOW what I'm going to do, I tell you. I live for the moment.
+To-morrow we are going out into the country.”
+
+“I don't understand,” said Benham with a gesture of resignation. “It
+seems to me that if a man and woman love each other--well, they insist
+upon each other. What is to happen to her if you leave her in Moscow?”
+
+“Damnation! Is there any need to ask that?”
+
+“Take her to Cambridge, man. And if Cambridge objects, teach Cambridge
+better manners.”
+
+Prothero's face was suddenly transfigured with rage.
+
+“I tell you she won't come!” he said.
+
+“Billy!” said Benham, “you should make her!”
+
+“I can't.”
+
+“If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything--”
+
+“But I don't love her like that,” said Prothero, shrill with anger. “I
+tell you I don't love her like that.”
+
+Then he lunged into further deeps. “It's the other men,” he said, “it's
+the things that have been. Don't you understand? Can't you understand?
+The memories--she must have memories--they come between us. It's
+something deeper than reason. It's in one's spine and under one's nails.
+One could do anything, I perceive, for one's very own woman....”
+
+“MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.
+
+“I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How could any man make her
+his very own woman now? You--you don't seem to understand--ANYTHING.
+She's nobody's woman--for ever. That--that might-have-been has gone for
+ever.... It's nerves--a passion of the nerves. There's a cruelty in life
+and-- She's KIND to me. She's so kind to me....”
+
+And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken
+fragments in letters. When he looked for Anna Alexievna in December--he
+never learnt her surname--he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar
+soon after Prothero's departure and he could not find whither she had
+gone. He never found her again. Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.
+
+Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion. But
+Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock
+to Benham's ideas. It was clear he went off almost callously; it would
+seem there was very little crying. Towards the end it was evident that
+the two had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very end of all. It
+was almost as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go.
+Then came regret, a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with
+every mile of distance.
+
+In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero. He had some hours
+there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy
+with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious
+secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant
+resemblance to Anna....
+
+In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back.
+“But now I had the damned frontier,” he wrote, “between us.”
+
+It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the
+“damned frontier” tip the balance against him.
+
+Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it
+seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured. “I can't stand this
+business,” he wrote. “It has things in it, possibilities of emotional
+disturbance--you can have no idea! In the train--luckily I was alone in
+the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it,
+I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar! A beastly German came and
+stood in the corridor to stare. I had to get out of the train. It is
+disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this....
+
+“Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you
+about my dismal feelings....”
+
+After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but
+to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable
+regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of
+his friend. Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.
+
+“There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris,” he wrote. “A levity.
+I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet undescribed
+radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of those
+tear-compelling German emanations....
+
+“And, Benham, I have found a friend.
+
+“A woman. Of course you will laugh, you will sneer. You do not
+understand these things.... Yet they are so simple. It was the strangest
+accident brought us together. There was something that drew us together.
+A sort of instinct. Near the Boulevard Poissoniere....”
+
+“Good heavens!” said Benham. “A sort of instinct!”
+
+“I told her all about Anna!”
+
+“Good Lord!” cried Benham.
+
+“She understood. Perfectly. None of your so-called 'respectable' women
+could have understood.... At first I intended merely to talk to her....”
+
+Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.
+
+“Little Anna Alexievna!” he said, “you were too clean for him.”
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel
+meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief,
+to the grey mildness of Trinity. He saw him, capped and gowned,
+and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming
+friendships.
+
+The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts
+and restrained celibates at the high tables. They ate on in their mature
+wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled. Presently they would
+withdraw processionally to the combination room....
+
+There would be much to talk about over the wine.
+
+Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow....
+
+He laughed abruptly.
+
+And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space
+of years. There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost
+in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office. Perhaps
+to this day they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in
+Kishinev or Ekaterinoslav....
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+In November, after an adventure in the trader's quarter of Kieff which
+had brought him within an inch of death, and because an emotional wave
+had swept across him and across his correspondence with Amanda, Benham
+went back suddenly to England and her. He wanted very greatly to see her
+and also he wanted to make certain arrangements about his property. He
+returned by way of Hungary, and sent telegrams like shouts of excitement
+whenever the train stopped for a sufficient time. “Old Leopard, I am
+coming, I am coming,” he telegraphed, announcing his coming for the
+fourth time. It was to be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the
+mutual refreshment of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to
+Russia again.
+
+Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the utmost
+dignity of expectant maternity. Like many other people he had been a
+little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a common human
+experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a rare and
+sacramental function. Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey,
+dove-like tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had given way to
+a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, her brisk little neck that had
+always reminded him of the stalk of a flower was now softened and
+rounded; her eyes were tender, and she moved about the place in the
+manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the
+scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and
+a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic,
+half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled
+immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside
+he found--it had been put there for him by Amanda--among much
+other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all
+philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.
+
+Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the impending
+fact. An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in
+the depths of London society, but to make up for his absence Mrs. Morris
+had taken a little cottage down by the river and the Wilder girls were
+with her, both afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it seemed,
+and more particularly Betty, prepared to be keenly critical of Benham's
+attitude.
+
+He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had
+returned in a rather different vein of exaltation.
+
+In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments an
+effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed. It was as if she
+put aside for him something official, something sincerely maintained,
+necessary, but at times a little irksome. It was as if she was glad to
+take him into her confidence and unbend. Within the pre-natal Amanda an
+impish Amanda still lingered.
+
+There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must never
+know....
+
+But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most unpontifical
+moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him
+home across Europe. At times she was extraordinarily jolly. They had two
+or three happy walks about the Chexington woods; that year the golden
+weather of October had flowed over into November, and except for a
+carpet of green and gold under the horse-chestnuts most of the leaves
+were still on the trees. Gleams of her old wanton humour shone on him.
+And then would come something else, something like a shadow across the
+world, something he had quite forgotten since his idea of heroic love
+had flooded him, something that reminded him of those long explanations
+with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that had never been explained, and of the
+curate in the doorway of the cottage and his unaccountable tears.
+
+On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little surprised
+to find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into the garden, with
+an accustomed familiarity. Sir Philip perceived him with a start that
+was instantly controlled, and greeted him with unnatural ease.
+
+Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket in
+the neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending the
+summer, the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from scholars
+and literary men. A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought to have been
+aviating or travelling.
+
+Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that there
+was a flavour of established association in their manner. But then Sir
+Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne. She called him “Pip,”
+ and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-court to him, “Pip!” And
+then he called her “Amanda.” When the Wilder girls came up to join the
+tennis he was just as brotherly....
+
+The next day he came to lunch.
+
+During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been before
+of the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes. They
+watched him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that seemed at
+once pained and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind
+of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably
+suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon
+Sir Philip would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up
+and go away in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he
+could be spoken to he contrived to speak to Benham.
+
+They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took advantage
+of a pause to commit his little indiscretion.
+
+“Mrs. Benham,” he said, “looks amazingly well--extraordinarily well,
+don't you think?”
+
+“Yes,” said Benham, startled. “Yes. She certainly keeps very well.”
+
+“She misses you terribly,” said Sir Philip; “it is a time when a woman
+misses her husband. But, of course, she does not want to hamper your
+work....”
+
+Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest in
+these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no better
+expression for this than a grunt.
+
+“You don't mind,” said the young man with a slight catch in the breath
+that might have been apprehensive, “that I sometimes bring her books and
+flowers and things? Do what little I can to keep life interesting down
+here? It's not very congenial.... She's so wonderful--I think she is the
+most wonderful woman in the world.”
+
+Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was
+really a primitive barbarian in these matters.
+
+“I've no doubt,” he said, “that my wife has every reason to be grateful
+for your attentions.”
+
+In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir Philip
+was engendering something still more personal. If so, he might
+be constrained to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of
+chrysanthemums over Sir Philip's head, or kick him in an improving
+manner. He had a ridiculous belief that Sir Philip would probably take
+anything of the sort very touchingly. He scrambled in his mind for some
+remark that would avert this possibility.
+
+“Have you ever been in Russia?” he asked hastily. “It is the most
+wonderful country in Europe. I had an odd adventure near Kiev. During a
+pogrom.”
+
+And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description....
+
+But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were presently
+thrown out by Lady Marayne. They were so much more in the air....
+
+
+
+18
+
+
+Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had foreseen.
+
+“Easton has gone away,” he remarked three days later to Amanda.
+
+“I told him to go. He is a bore with you about. But otherwise he is
+rather a comfort, Cheetah.” She meditated upon Sir Philip. “And he's an
+HONOURABLE man,” she said. “He's safe....”
+
+
+
+19
+
+
+After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in
+earnest. The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic love for
+the modern aristocrat ended abruptly. Instead there came the first draft
+for a study of jealousy. The note was written in pencil on Chexington
+notepaper and manifestly that had been supported on the ribbed cover
+of a book. There was a little computation in the corner, converting
+forty-five degrees Reaumur into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White
+guess it had been written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it had been
+written in a rather amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's
+journey to the gathering revolt in Moscow....
+
+“I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual
+jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible,
+something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort
+to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so
+easily settled with....
+
+“One likes to know.... Possibly one wants to know too much.... In phases
+of fatigue, and particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one
+is leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an irrational
+torment....
+
+“And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of this
+base motive. I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how strongly
+jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with a
+man....
+
+“There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human being
+being one's ownest own--utterly one's own....
+
+“There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives....
+
+“One does....
+
+“There is something dishonouring in distrust--to both the distrusted and
+the one who distrusts....”
+
+After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.
+
+
+
+20
+
+
+Benham did not see Amanda again until after the birth of their child.
+He spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the fitful
+fighting and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and taking
+care of a lost and helpless English family whose father had gone astray
+temporarily on the way home from Baku. Then he went southward to Rostov
+and thence to Astrakhan. Here he really began his travels. He determined
+to get to India by way of Herat and for the first time in his life
+rode out into an altogether lawless wilderness. He went on obstinately
+because he found himself disposed to funk the journey, and because
+discouragements were put in his way. He was soon quite cut off from all
+the ways of living he had known. He learnt what it is to be flea-bitten,
+saddle-sore, hungry and, above all, thirsty. He was haunted by a dread
+of fever, and so contrived strange torments for himself with overdoses
+of quinine. He ceased to be traceable from Chexington in March, and he
+reappeared in the form of a telegram from Karachi demanding news in May.
+He learnt he was the father of a man-child and that all was well with
+Amanda.
+
+He had not expected to be so long away from any communication with the
+outer world, and something in the nature of a stricken conscience took
+him back to England. He found a second William Porphyry in the world,
+dominating Chexington, and Amanda tenderly triumphant and passionate,
+the Madonna enthroned. For William Porphyry he could feel no emotion.
+William Porphyry was very red and ugly and protesting, feeble and
+aggressive, a matter for a skilled nurse. To see him was to ignore him
+and dispel a dream. It was to Amanda Benham turned again.
+
+For some days he was content to adore his Madonna and listen to the
+familiar flatteries of her love. He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda
+said, and wiser, so that she was afraid of him....
+
+And then he became aware that she was requiring him to stay at her side.
+“We have both had our adventures,” she said, which struck him as an odd
+phrase.
+
+It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those
+conceptions of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so
+clearly understood between them had vanished from her mind. She had
+absolutely forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had seemed
+to him the crowning instant, the real marriage of their lives. It
+had gone, it had left no recoverable trace in her. And upon his
+interpretations of that he had loved her passionately for a year. She
+was back at exactly the ideas and intentions that ruled her during their
+first settlement in London. She wanted a joint life in the social world
+of London, she demanded his presence, his attention, the daily practical
+evidences of love. It was all very well for him to be away when the
+child was coming, but now everything was different. Now he must stay by
+her.
+
+This time he argued no case. These issues he had settled for ever. Even
+an indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation that began
+with appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him. Behind these things
+now was India. The huge problems of India had laid an unshakeable hold
+upon his imagination. He had seen Russia, and he wanted to balance that
+picture by a vision of the east....
+
+He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington. The young man
+displayed no further disposition to be confidentially sentimental. But
+he seemed to have something on his mind. And Amanda said not a word
+about him. He was a young man above suspicion, Benham felt....
+
+And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these
+two larger carnivores began to change. Except for the repetition of
+accustomed endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense of
+the word. They dealt chiefly with the “Cub,” and even there Benham felt
+presently that the enthusiasm diminished. A new amazing quality for
+Amanda appeared--triteness. The very writing of her letters changed
+as though it had suddenly lost backbone. Her habitual liveliness
+of phrasing lost its point. Had she lost her animation? Was she ill
+unknowingly? Where had the light gone? It was as if her attention was
+distracted.... As if every day when she wrote her mind was busy about
+something else.
+
+Abruptly at last he understood. A fact that had never been stated,
+never formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to
+convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question
+perceived to be THERE....
+
+He left a record of that moment of realization.
+
+“Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had
+never seen Amanda before. Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with that
+same dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a pitiless, a
+scientific distinctness that has neither light nor shadow....
+
+“Of course,” I said, and then presently I got up very softly....
+
+“I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin. I wanted
+to feel the largeness of the sky. I went out upon the deck. We were off
+the coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment, there comes back
+to me also the faint flavour of spice in the air, the low line of the
+coast, the cool flooding abundance of the Indian moonlight, the swish
+of the black water against the side of the ship. And a perception of
+infinite loss, as if the limitless heavens above this earth and below
+to the very uttermost star were just one boundless cavity from which
+delight had fled....
+
+“Of course I had lost her. I knew it with absolute certainty. I knew it
+from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her needs. I knew it
+from every line she had written me in the last three months. I knew it
+intuitively. She had been unfaithful. She must have been unfaithful.
+
+“What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?”
+
+
+
+21
+
+
+“Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters. Let me
+be at least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I may
+have been led into by force of my passions. Always I have despised
+jealousy....
+
+“Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the aristocratic
+life to be achieved. They come in a certain order, and in that order the
+spirit of man is armed against them less and less efficiently. Of fear
+and my struggle against fear I have told already. I am fearful. I am a
+physical coward until I can bring shame and anger to my assistance,
+but in overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole body of human
+tradition. Every one, the basest creatures, every Hottentot, every
+stunted creature that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the
+instinctive constitution of man is at fault here and that fear is
+shameful and must be subdued. The race is on one's side. And so there is
+a vast traditional support for a man against the Second Limitation, the
+limitation of physical indulgence. It is not so universal as the first,
+there is a grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness, but common
+pride is against it. And in this matter my temperament has been my help:
+I am fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil
+from excess. It is no great virtue; it happens so; it is something in
+the nerves of my skin. I cannot endure myself unshaven or in any way
+unclean; I am tormented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories,
+and after I had once loved Amanda I could not--unless some irrational
+impulse to get equal with her had caught me--have broken my faith to
+her, whatever breach there was in her faith to me....
+
+“I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more easily
+clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that distinctive
+virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment and anger.
+
+“I despised a jealous man. There is a traditional discredit of jealousy,
+not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very strong. But
+the general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with the
+supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, that it is unreasonable
+suspicion. Given a cause then tradition speaks with an uncertain
+voice....
+
+“I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was
+impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable
+to imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as
+fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my
+image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that she
+was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently,
+gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a pool, that
+knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated up into my
+consciousness.
+
+“And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me! Outrageously. Abominably.
+
+“Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this
+question. My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right
+whatever to her love or loyalty. I must have that very clear....
+
+“This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except accidentally
+here and there, incompatible with the domestic life. It means going
+hither and thither in the universe of thought as much as in the universe
+of matter, it means adventure, it means movement and adventure that must
+needs be hopelessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it means
+self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit into the welfare of a
+family. In all ages, directly society had risen above the level of a
+barbaric tribal village, this need of a release from the family for
+certain necessary types of people has been recognized. It was
+met sometimes informally, sometimes formally, by the growth and
+establishment of special classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of
+pledged knights, of a great variety of non-family people, whose
+concern was the larger collective life that opens out beyond the
+simple necessities and duties and loyalties of the steading and of the
+craftsman's house. Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form
+of celibacy; but besides that there have been a hundred institutional
+variations of the common life to meet the need of the special man,
+the man who must go deep and the man who must go far. A vowed celibacy
+ceased to be a tolerable rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic
+idea entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristocracy means the
+abandonment of the racial future to a proletariat of base unleaderly
+men. That was plain to Plato. It was plain to Campanelea. It was plain
+to the Protestant reformers. But the world has never yet gone on to
+the next step beyond that recognition, to the recognition of feminine
+aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as untrammelled by domestic
+servitudes and family relationships as the men of their kind. That I see
+has always been my idea since in my undergraduate days I came under the
+spell of Plato. It was a matter of course that my first gift to Amanda
+should be his REPUBLIC. I loved Amanda transfigured in that dream....
+
+“There are no such women....
+
+“It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with myself.
+I had no sound reason for supposing that. I did suppose that. I did not
+perceive that not only was she younger than myself, but that while I
+had been going through a mill of steely education, kept close, severely
+exercised, polished by discussion, she had but the weak training of a
+not very good school, some scrappy reading, the vague discussions
+of village artists, and the draped and decorated novelties of the
+'advanced.' It all went to nothing on the impact of the world.... She
+showed herself the woman the world has always known, no miracle, and
+the alternative was for me to give myself to her in the ancient way, to
+serve her happiness, to control her and delight and companion her, or to
+let her go.
+
+“The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm and
+her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home. She demands
+the concentration of a man. Not to be able to command that is her
+failure. Not to give her that is to shame her. As I had shamed
+Amanda....”
+
+
+
+22
+
+
+“There are no such women.” He had written this in and struck it out, and
+then at some later time written it in again. There it stayed now as his
+last persuasion, but it set White thinking and doubting. And, indeed,
+there was another sheet of pencilled broken stuff that seemed to glance
+at quite another type of womanhood.
+
+
+
+23
+
+
+“It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the remaking of
+the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as great as those
+from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes. These women must
+become aristocratic through their own innate impulse, they must be
+self-called to their lives, exactly as men must be; there is no making
+an aristocrat without a predisposition for rule and nobility. And they
+have to discover and struggle against just exactly the limitations that
+we have to struggle against. They have to conquer not only fear
+but indulgence, indulgence of a softer, more insidious quality, and
+jealousy--proprietorship....
+
+“It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand times
+in my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and desired a
+mate. A mate--not a possession. It is a need almost naively simple. If
+only one could have a woman who thought of one and with one! Though
+she were on the other side of the world and busied about a thousand
+things....
+
+“'WITH one,' I see it must be rather than 'OF one.' That 'of one' is
+just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again....
+
+“Man is a mating creature. It is not good to be alone. But mating means
+a mate....
+
+“We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying....
+
+“And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers. 'Dancing
+attendance'--as they used to say. We should meet upon our ways as the
+great carnivores do....
+
+“That at any rate was a sound idea. Though we only played with it.
+
+“But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible
+satisfaction now for me. What is the good of dreaming? Life and chance
+have played a trick upon my body and soul. I am mated, though I am
+mated to a phantom. I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton's Amanda, but
+Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams. Sense, and particularly the
+sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason in us. There can be no mate
+for me now unless she comes with Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and
+Amanda's quick movements and her clever hands....”
+
+
+
+24
+
+
+“Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?
+
+“There were things between us two as lovers,--love, things more
+beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind
+hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression,
+images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight
+in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off
+wonderful music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing
+softly, of floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and
+sudden as the knife of an assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears,
+tears that are happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations,
+gratitudes, sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft
+eyelid closed in sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard
+unexpectedly; sweet, dear magical things that I can find no words
+for....
+
+“If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that she
+was not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that has been
+between us more cheaply than I did? It does not change one jot of it for
+me. At the time she did not hold it cheaply. She forgets where I do not
+forget....”
+
+
+
+25
+
+
+Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.
+
+Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda and
+himself.
+
+He did not at once turn homeward. It was in Ceylon that he dropped his
+work and came home. At Colombo he found a heap of letters awaiting him,
+and there were two of these that had started at the same time. They had
+been posted in London on one eventful afternoon. Lady Marayne and Amanda
+had quarrelled violently. Two earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women,
+full of neat but belated repartee, separated to write their simultaneous
+letters. Each letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.
+Lady Marayne told her story ruthlessly. Amanda, on the other hand,
+generalized, and explained. Sir Philip's adoration of her was a
+love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure. Was there no trust nor
+courage in the world? She would defy all jealous scandal. She would not
+even banish him from her side. Surely the Cheetah could trust her. But
+the pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond Amanda's explaining. The
+little lady's dignity had been stricken. “I have been used as a cloak,”
+ she wrote.
+
+Her phrases were vivid. She quoted the very words of Amanda, words she
+had overheard at Chexington in the twilight. They were no invention.
+They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover. It was as sure as if
+Benham had heard the sound of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen,
+as if she had crept by him, stooping and rustling softly. It brought
+back the living sense of her, excited, flushed, reckless; his
+wild-haired Amanda of infinite delight.... All day those words of hers
+pursued him. All night they flared across the black universe. He buried
+his face in the pillows and they whispered softly in his ear.
+
+He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.
+
+He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the
+stirring quiet of the stars.
+
+He sent no notice of his coming back. Nor did he come back with a
+definite plan. But he wanted to get at Amanda.
+
+
+
+26
+
+
+It was with Amanda he had to reckon. Towards Easton he felt scarcely any
+anger at all. Easton he felt only existed for him because Amanda willed
+to have it so.
+
+Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger. His
+devotion filled Benham with scorn. His determination to serve Amanda at
+any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights for her,
+his humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her moods and
+happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility. That rage
+against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist against a blackleg.
+Are all the women to fall to the men who will be their master-slaves and
+keepers? But it was not simply that Benham felt men must be freed from
+this incessant attendance; women too must free themselves from their
+almost instinctive demand for an attendant....
+
+His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings. Never
+in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and
+won and competed for and fought over. So that it was Amanda he wanted
+to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses
+only to fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and jealous fury.
+But the forces that were driving him home now were the forces below the
+level of reason and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and desire,
+profound aboriginal urgencies. He thought, indeed, very little as he
+lay in his berth or sulked on deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless
+invasion of exasperating images that ever and again would so wring him
+that his muscles would tighten and his hands clench or he would find
+himself restraining a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.
+
+Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole world.
+She filled the skies. She bent over him and mocked him. She became a
+mystery of passion and dark beauty. She was the sin of the world. One
+breathed her in the winds of the sea. She had taken to herself the
+greatness of elemental things....
+
+So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see that
+she was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather tired and
+very frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an evening-dress of
+unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of gold and colour about
+her wrists and neck.
+
+In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him
+homeward. He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has
+greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.
+
+For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to kill
+than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.
+
+
+
+27
+
+
+He took them by surprise. It had been his intention to take them by
+surprise. Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.
+
+He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near Charing
+Cross. In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in Lancaster
+Gate. The butler was deferentially amazed. Mrs. Benham was, he said, at
+a theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought some other people also.
+He did not know when she would be back. She might go on to supper. It
+was not the custom for the servants to wait up for her.
+
+Benham went into the study that reduplicated his former rooms in Finacue
+Street and sat down before the fire the butler lit for him. He sent the
+man to bed, and fell into profound meditation.
+
+It was nearly two o'clock when he heard the sound of her latchkey and
+went out at once upon the landing.
+
+The half-door stood open and Easton's car was outside. She stood in
+the middle of the hall and relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he was
+carrying.
+
+“Good-night,” she said, “I am so tired.”
+
+“My wonderful goddess,” he said.
+
+She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, then started, stared, and
+wrenched herself out of his arms.
+
+Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon them,
+white-faced and inexpressive. Easton dropped back a pace. For a moment
+no one moved nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton shut the half-door
+and shut out the noises of the road.
+
+For some seconds Benham regarded them, and as he did so his spirit
+changed....
+
+Everything he had thought of saying and doing vanished out of his mind.
+
+He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended the staircase. When
+he was five or six steps above them, he spoke. “Just sit down here,” he
+said, with a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself upon the stairs.
+“DO sit down,” he said with a sudden testiness as they continued
+standing. “I know all about this affair. Do please sit down and let us
+talk.... Everybody's gone to bed long ago.”
+
+“Cheetah!” she said. “Why have you come back like this?”
+
+Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet.
+
+“I wish you would sit down, Easton,” he said in a voice of subdued
+savagery.
+
+“Why have you come back?” Sir Philip Easton found his voice to ask.
+
+“SIT down,” Benham spat, and Easton obeyed unwillingly.
+
+“I came back,” Benham went on, “to see to all this. Why else? I
+don't--now I see you--feel very fierce about it. But it has distressed
+me. You look changed, Amanda, and fagged. And your hair is untidy. It's
+as if something had happened to you and made you a stranger.... You two
+people are lovers. Very natural and simple, but I want to get out of it.
+Yes, I want to get out of it. That wasn't quite my idea, but now I see
+it is. It's queer, but on the whole I feel sorry for you. All of us,
+poor humans--. There's reason to be sorry for all of us. We're full
+of lusts and uneasiness and resentments that we haven't the will to
+control. What do you two people want me to do to you? Would you like a
+divorce, Amanda? It's the clean, straight thing, isn't it? Or would the
+scandal hurt you?”
+
+Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on Benham.
+
+“Give us a divorce,” said Easton, looking to her to confirm him.
+
+Amanda shook her head.
+
+“I don't want a divorce,” she said.
+
+“Then what do you want?” asked Benham with sudden asperity.
+
+“I don't want a divorce,” she repeated. “Why do you, after a long
+silence, come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?”
+
+“It was the way it took me,” said Benham, after a little interval.
+
+“You have left me for long months.”
+
+“Yes. I was angry. And it was ridiculous to be angry. I thought I wanted
+to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is to help
+you out of this miserable mess--and then get away from you. You two
+would like to marry. You ought to be married.”
+
+“I would die to make Amanda happy,” said Easton.
+
+“Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make her happy. That you
+may find more of a strain. Less tragic and more tiresome. I, on the
+other hand, want neither to die nor live for her.” Amanda moved sharply.
+“It's extraordinary what amazing vapours a lonely man may get into his
+head. If you don't want a divorce then I suppose things might go on as
+they are now.”
+
+“I hate things as they are now,” said Easton. “I hate this falsehood and
+deception.”
+
+“You would hate the scandal just as much,” said Amanda.
+
+“I would not care what the scandal was unless it hurt you.”
+
+“It would be only a temporary inconvenience,” said Benham. “Every one
+would sympathize with you.... The whole thing is so natural.... People
+would be glad to forget very soon. They did with my mother.”
+
+“No,” said Amanda, “it isn't so easy as that.”
+
+She seemed to come to a decision.
+
+“Pip,” she said. “I want to talk to--HIM--alone.”
+
+Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity. “But why?”
+ he asked.
+
+“I do,” she said.
+
+“But this is a thing for US.”
+
+“Pip, I want to talk to him alone. There is something--something I can't
+say before you....”
+
+Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet.
+
+“Shall I wait outside?”
+
+“No, Pip. Go home. Yes,--there are some things you must leave to me.”
+
+She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the
+younger man. The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to be
+at any cost splendid. He felt--and it was a most unexpected and
+disconcerting feeling--that he was no longer confederated with Amanda;
+that prior, more fundamental and greater associations prevailed over his
+little new grip upon her mind and senses. He stared at husband and wife
+aghast in this realization. Then his resolute romanticism came to his
+help. “I would trust you--” he began. “If you tell me to go--”
+
+Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.
+
+She laid her hand upon his arm. “Go, my dear Pip,” she said. “Go.”
+
+He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham
+as though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen,
+somewhere, he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in a
+gap that otherwise he could not have supplied.
+
+Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly
+dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.
+
+“WELL?” said Benham.
+
+She held out her arms to him.
+
+“Why did you leave me, Cheetah? Why did you leave me?”
+
+
+
+28
+
+
+Benham affected to ignore those proffered arms. But they recalled in
+a swift rush the animal anger that had brought him back to England.
+To remind him of desire now was to revive an anger stronger than any
+desire. He spoke seeking to hurt her.
+
+“I am wondering now,” he said, “why the devil I came back.”
+
+“You had to come back to me.”
+
+“I could have written just as well about these things.”
+
+“CHEETAH,” she said softly, and came towards him slowly, stooping
+forward and looking into his eyes, “you had to come back to see your old
+Leopard. Your wretched Leopard. Who has rolled in the dirt. And is still
+yours.”
+
+“Do you want a divorce? How are we to fix things, Amanda?”
+
+“Cheetah, I will tell you how we will fix things.”
+
+She dropped upon the step below him. She laid her hands with a
+deliberate softness upon him, she gave a toss so that her disordered
+hair was a little more disordered, and brought her soft chin down to
+touch his knees. Her eyes implored him.
+
+“Cheetah,” she said. “You are going to forgive.”
+
+He sat rigid, meeting her eyes.
+
+“Amanda,” he said at last, “you would be astonished if I kicked you away
+from me and trampled over you to the door. That is what I want to do.”
+
+“Do it,” she said, and the grip of her hands tightened. “Cheetah, dear!
+I would love you to kill me.”
+
+“I don't want to kill you.”
+
+Her eyes dilated. “Beat me.”
+
+“And I haven't the remotest intention of making love to you,” he said,
+and pushed her soft face and hands away from him as if he would stand
+up.
+
+She caught hold of him again. “Stay with me,” she said.
+
+He made no effort to shake off her grip. He looked at the dark cloud of
+her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of old delights
+made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as he spoke. “Dear
+Leopard,” he said, “we humans are the most streaky of conceivable
+things. I thought I hated you. I do. I hate you like poison. And also I
+do not hate you at all.”
+
+Then abruptly he was standing over her.
+
+She rose to her knees.
+
+“Stay here, old Cheetah!” she said. “This is your house. I am your
+wife.”
+
+He went towards the unfastened front door.
+
+“Cheetah!” she cried with a note of despair.
+
+He halted at the door.
+
+“Amanda, I will come to-morrow. I will come in the morning, in the sober
+London daylight, and then we will settle things.”
+
+He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled. He spoke as one who
+remarks upon a quite unexpected fact....
+
+“Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human being that I wanted so
+little to kill.”
+
+
+
+29
+
+
+White found a fragment that might have been written within a week of
+those last encounters of Benham and Amanda.
+
+“The thing that astonished me most in Amanda was the change in her
+mental quality.
+
+“With me in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she had
+deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself.
+Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it
+was gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing
+of poses and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei.
+Beneath that surface I could not discover anything individual at all.
+Fear and a grasping quality, such as God gave us all when he gave us
+hands; but the individual I knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard
+was gone. Whither, I cannot imagine. An amazing disappearance. Clean out
+of space and time like a soul lost for ever.
+
+“When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene, she
+acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in reality....
+
+“I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this way,
+by cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she despised....
+There can be no inequality in love. Give and take must balance. One must
+be one's natural self or the whole business is an indecent trick, a vile
+use of life! To use inferiors in love one must needs talk down to
+them, interpret oneself in their insufficient phrases, pretend,
+sentimentalize. And it is clear that unless oneself is to be lost, one
+must be content to leave alone all those people that one can reach
+only by sentimentalizing. But Amanda--and yet somehow I love her for
+it still--could not leave any one alone. So she was always feverishly
+weaving nets of false relationship. Until her very self was forgotten.
+So she will go on until the end. With Easton it had been necessary for
+her to key herself to a simple exalted romanticism that was entirely
+insincere. She had so accustomed herself to these poses that her innate
+gestures were forgotten. She could not recover them; she could not
+even reinvent them. Between us there were momentary gleams as though
+presently we should be our frank former selves again. They were never
+more than momentary....”
+
+And that was all that this astonishing man had seen fit to tell of his
+last parting from his wife.
+
+Perhaps he did Amanda injustice. Perhaps there was a stronger thread
+of reality in her desire to recover him than he supposed. Clearly he
+believed that under the circumstances Amanda would have tried to recover
+anybody.
+
+She had dressed for that morning's encounter in a very becoming and
+intimate wrap of soft mauve and white silk, and she had washed and dried
+her dark hair so that it was a vapour about her face. She set herself
+with a single mind to persuade herself and Benham that they were
+inseparable lovers, and she would not be deflected by his grim
+determination to discuss the conditions of their separation. When he
+asked her whether she wanted a divorce, she offered to throw over
+Sir Philip and banish him for ever as lightly as a great lady might
+sacrifice an objectionable poodle to her connubial peace.
+
+Benham passed through perplexing phases, so that she herself began to
+feel that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands. His initial
+grimness she could understand, and partially its breakdown into
+irritability. But she was puzzled by his laughter. For he laughed
+abruptly.
+
+“You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of tremendous tragedy. And
+really,--you are a Lark.”
+
+And then overriding her altogether, he told her what he meant to do
+about their future and the future of their little son.
+
+“You don't want a divorce and a fuss. Then I'll leave things. I perceive
+I've no intention of marrying any more. But you'd better do the straight
+thing. People forget and forgive. Especially when there is no one about
+making a fuss against you.
+
+“Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for shirking it.
+We'll both be able to get at the boy then. You'll not hurt him, and
+I shall want to see him. It's better for the boy anyhow not to have a
+divorce.
+
+“I'll not stand in your way. I'll get a little flat and I shan't come
+too much to London, and when I do, you can get out of town. You must be
+discreet about Easton, and if people say anything about him, send them
+to me. After all, this is our private affair.
+
+“We'll go on about money matters as we have been going. I trust to you
+not to run me into overwhelming debts. And, of course, if at any time,
+you do want to marry--on account of children or anything--if nobody
+knows of this conversation we can be divorced then....”
+
+Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while Amanda
+gathered her forces for her last appeal.
+
+It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down
+before him and clung to his knees. He struggled ridiculously to get
+himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate on
+the floor with her dishevelled hair about her.
+
+She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark
+Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet
+without. He had come back. The door reopened. There was a slight pause,
+and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the second
+housemaid. There are moments, suspended fragments of time rather than
+links in its succession, when the human eye is more intelligible than
+any words.
+
+The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a click of
+the door.
+
+“DAMN!” said Amanda.
+
+Then slowly she rose to her knees.
+
+She meditated through vast moments.
+
+“It's a cursed thing to be a woman,” said Amanda. She stood up. She put
+her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot about it.
+After another long interval of thought she spoke.
+
+“Cheetah!” she said, “Old Cheetah!...
+
+“I didn't THINK it of you....”
+
+Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a
+reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who
+packs a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.
+
+
+
+30
+
+
+The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in
+Danebury Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham's private
+processes the morning after this affair.
+
+Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London. She
+had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly
+decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to
+behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way. On the
+morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor waiter that the
+occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar in the night, and almost
+immediately she was summoned to see Benham.
+
+He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little
+obscure the condition of the room behind him. He was carefully dressed,
+and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever. But one of his
+hands was tied up in a white bandage.
+
+“I am going this morning,” he said, “I am going down now to breakfast. I
+have had a few little accidents with some of the things in the room and
+I have cut my hand. I want you to tell the manager and see that they are
+properly charged for on the bill.... Thank you.”
+
+The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.
+
+Benham's things were all packed up and the room had an air of having
+been straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive
+cataclysm. One or two items that the chambermaid might possibly have
+overlooked in the normal course of things were carefully exhibited. For
+example, the sheet had been torn into half a dozen strips and they were
+lying side by side on the bed. The clock on the mantelpiece had
+been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded to pieces. All the
+looking-glasses in the room were smashed, apparently the electric lamp
+that stood on the night table by the bedside had been wrenched off and
+flung or hammered about amidst the other breakables. And there was
+a considerable amount of blood splashed about the room. The head
+chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the spectacle and
+summoned her most convenient friend, the head chambermaid on the third
+floor, to her aid. The first-floor waiter joined their deliberations
+and several housemaids displayed a respectful interest in the matter.
+Finally they invoked the manager. He was still contemplating the scene
+of the disorder when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates warned
+him of Benham's return.
+
+Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly
+tranquil.
+
+“I had a kind of nightmare,” he said. “I am fearfully sorry to have
+disarranged your room. You must charge me for the inconvenience as well
+as for the damage.”
+
+
+
+31
+
+
+“An aristocrat cannot be a lover.”
+
+“One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of life
+and the intricacies of another human being. I do not mean that one may
+not love. One loves the more because one does not concentrate one's
+love. One loves nations, the people passing in the street, beasts hurt
+by the wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons in tears....
+
+“But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's hands
+I do not think one can expect to be loved.
+
+“An aristocrat must do without close personal love....”
+
+This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper. The writing ended
+halfway down the page. Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it
+was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter
+that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations. Its incompleteness
+made its expression perfect....
+
+There Benham's love experience ended. He turned to the great business
+of the world. Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like
+Fear they were to be dismissed as far as possible and subdued when
+they could not be altogether dismissed. Whatever stirrings of blood or
+imagination there were in him after that parting, whatever failures from
+this resolution, they left no trace on the rest of his research, which
+was concerned with the hates of peoples and classes and war and peace
+and the possibilities science unveils and starry speculations of what
+mankind may do.
+
+
+
+32
+
+
+But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter
+with Lady Marayne.
+
+The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger and
+distress. Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so hopelessly
+dispersed and mixed. And when for a moment it seemed to him that she was
+not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all, then with an instant
+eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory gleam. “What are you doing
+in England, Poff?” she demanded. “And what are you going to do?
+
+“Nothing! And you are going to leave her in your house, with your
+property and a lover. If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come back?
+And why did you ever marry her? You might have known; her father was a
+swindler. She's begotten of deceit. She'll tell her own story while you
+are away, and a pretty story she'll make of it.”
+
+“Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?”
+
+“I never wanted you to go away from her. If you'd stayed and watched her
+as a man should, as I begged you and implored you to do. Didn't I tell
+you, Poff? Didn't I warn you?”
+
+“But now what am I to do?”
+
+“There you are! That's just a man's way. You get yourself into this
+trouble, you follow your passions and your fancies and fads and then
+you turn to me! How can I help you now, Poff? If you'd listened to me
+before!”
+
+Her blue eyes were demonstratively round.
+
+“Yes, but--”
+
+“I warned you,” she interrupted. “I warned you. I've done all I could
+for you. It isn't that I haven't seen through her. When she came to me
+at first with that made-up story of a baby! And all about loving me like
+her own mother. But I did what I could. I thought we might still make
+the best of a bad job. And then--. I might have known she couldn't leave
+Pip alone.... But for weeks I didn't dream. I wouldn't dream. Right
+under my nose. The impudence of it!”
+
+Her voice broke. “Such a horrid mess! Such a hopeless, horrid mess!”
+
+She wiped away a bright little tear....
+
+“It's all alike. It's your way with us. All of you. There isn't a man
+in the world deserves to have a woman in the world. We do all we can
+for you. We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for you and we talk for
+you. All the sweet, warm little women there are! And then you go away
+from us! There never was a woman yet who pleased and satisfied a man,
+who did not lose him. Give you everything and off you must go! Lovers,
+mothers....”
+
+It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother's troubles did not deal
+exclusively with himself.
+
+“But Amanda,” he began.
+
+“If you'd looked after her properly, it would have been right enough.
+Pip was as good as gold until she undermined him.... A woman can't wait
+about like an umbrella in a stand.... He was just a boy.... Only of
+course there she was--a novelty. It is perfectly easy to understand. She
+flattered him.... Men are such fools.”
+
+“Still--it's no good saying that now.”
+
+“But she'll spend all your money, Poff! She'll break your back with
+debts. What's to prevent her? With him living on her! For that's what it
+comes to practically.”
+
+“Well, what am I to do?”
+
+“You aren't going back without tying her up, Poff? You ought to stop
+every farthing of her money--every farthing. It's your duty.”
+
+“I can't do things like that.”
+
+“But have you no Shame? To let that sort of thing go on!”
+
+“If I don't feel the Shame of it-- And I don't.”
+
+“And that money--. I got you that money, Poff! It was my money.”
+
+Benham stared at her perplexed. “What am I to do?” he asked.
+
+“Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay her through a solicitor.
+Say that if she sees him ONCE again--”
+
+He reflected. “No,” he said at last.
+
+“Poff!” she cried, “every time I see you, you are more and more like
+your father. You're going off--just as he did. That baffled, MULISH
+look--priggish--solemn! Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor woman has to
+bring into the world. But you'll do nothing. I know you'll do nothing.
+You'll stand everything. You--you Cuckold! And she'll drive by me,
+she'll pass me in theatres with the money that ought to have been mine!
+Oh! Oh!”
+
+She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other. But she
+went on talking. Faster and faster, less and less coherently; more and
+more wildly abusive. Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham
+sighed profoundly....
+
+It brought the scene to a painful end....
+
+For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.
+
+He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in
+default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her--he
+could never define what he owed her.
+
+And yet, what on earth was one to do?
+
+And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had
+misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred
+goodwill. He went down to see him before he returned to India. But if
+there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham senior, it had been
+very carefully boarded over. The parental mind and attention were
+entirely engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD about the heuristic
+method. Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the
+thing was rankling almost unendurably. It seemed to be a relief to him
+to show his son very fully the essentially illogical position of his
+assailant. He was entirely inattentive to Benham's carefully made
+conversational opportunities. He would be silent at times while Benham
+talked and then he would break out suddenly with: “What seems to me
+so unreasonable, so ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second
+argument--if one can call it an argument--.... A man who reasons as he
+does is bound to get laughed at. If people will only see it....”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913. Sometimes
+the two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection,
+sometimes with great bitterness. When he met White in Johannesburg
+during the strike period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in London
+and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite footing.
+It was her suggestion that they should meet.
+
+About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction. He could not
+persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his relations to
+her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at no
+precise point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ignoble
+step. Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life. Like
+all of us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life
+in a certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an
+entirely different and unexpected way.... He had been ready for noble
+deeds and villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the
+dominant fact of his personal life was a perplexing riddle. He could
+not hate and condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of
+exoneration; he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without
+immediate shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he
+could not banish her from his mind.
+
+During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his
+mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but
+often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing
+denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing
+accepted. Meanwhile he worked. His nervous irritability increased, but
+it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.
+
+Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and
+method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put
+together under his headings of the first three “Limitations.” He
+had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that
+instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which
+he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of
+Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda.
+He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown that beating in his
+brain.
+
+Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
+prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this dream
+of a larger human purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and
+define that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and
+comprehending form of all the activities of the noble life. One cannot
+be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to
+an end. To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing more
+comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous and coherent than it is
+to-day seemed to him the fundamental intention of all nobility. He
+believed more and more firmly that the impulses to make and help and
+subserve great purposes are abundantly present in the world, that they
+are inhibited by hasty thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and
+that the real ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a
+release. He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men
+dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and
+he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult
+limitation. In one place he had written it, “Prejudice or Divisions.”
+ That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in the measure of
+its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great age, the noble age,
+would begin.
+
+So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world
+about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties
+and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White
+struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of
+this search for “Prejudice.” It seemed to White to be at once the most
+magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises. It was indeed no
+less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure
+and disorder.... And it was all too manifest to White also that the last
+place in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the
+back of his own head.
+
+Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array
+of influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of
+patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence
+of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the
+purely personal dissensions between man and man. And he developed a
+metaphysical interpretation of these troubles. “No doubt,” he wrote in
+one place, “much of the evil between different kinds of men is due to
+uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to
+bad thinking.” At times he seemed on the verge of the persuasion that
+most human trouble is really due to bad metaphysics. It was, one must
+remark, an extraordinary journey he had made; he had started from
+chivalry and arrived at metaphysics; every knight he held must be a
+logician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the mind. One thinks of his
+coming to this conclusion with knit brows and balancing intentness
+above whole gulfs of bathos--very much as he had once walked the Leysin
+Bisse....
+
+“Men do not know how to think,” he insisted--getting along the
+planks; “and they will not realize that they do not know how to
+think. Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of
+misconceptions.... Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the mind,
+and muddled thinking as ignoble as dirty conduct.... Infinitely more
+disastrous.”
+
+And again he wrote: “Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too
+eager to get into action. There is our deepest trouble. He takes
+conclusions ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry. Life is so short
+that he thinks it better to err than wait. He has no patience, no faith
+in anything but himself. He thinks he is a being when in reality he is
+only a link in a being, and so he is more anxious to be complete than
+right. The last devotion of which he is capable is that devotion of
+the mind which suffers partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive
+thought. He scamps his thought and finishes his performance, and before
+he is dead it is already being abandoned and begun all over again by
+some one else in the same egotistical haste....”
+
+It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these words
+should have been written by a man who walked the plank to fresh ideas
+with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward,
+and who acted time after time with an altogether disastrous hastiness.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the
+cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice
+and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research
+Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays
+and abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale,
+than you can profess religion and refuse to think about God. In the past
+it was possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to
+unexamined things. One could be loyal to unexamined things because they
+were unchallenged things. But now everything is challenged. By the
+time of his second visit to Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious
+and deliberate aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal
+responsibility had already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he
+was, as it were, an uncrowned king in the world. To be noble is to
+be aristocratic, that is to say, a ruler. Thence it follows that
+aristocracy is multiple kingship, and to be an aristocrat is to partake
+both of the nature of philosopher and king....
+
+Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no
+means necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in quality,
+petty in spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and limited,
+fall far short of kingship. Nevertheless, there IS nobility, there
+IS kingship, or this earth is a dustbin and mankind but a kind of
+skin-disease upon a planet. From that it is an easy step to this idea,
+the idea whose first expression had already so touched the imagination
+of Amanda, of a sort of diffused and voluntary kingship scattered
+throughout mankind. The aristocrats are not at the high table, the
+kings are not enthroned, those who are enthroned are but pretenders and
+SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar; the real king and ruler is every man who
+sets aside the naive passions and self-interest of the common life for
+the rule and service of the world.
+
+This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary writing. It
+is one of those ideas that seem to appear simultaneously at many points
+in the world, and it is impossible to say now how far Benham was
+an originator of this idea, and how far he simply resonated to its
+expression by others. It was far more likely that Prothero, getting it
+heaven knows where, had spluttered it out and forgotten it, leaving it
+to germinate in the mind of his friend....
+
+This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to
+Benham as his life went on. When Benham walked the Bisse he was just
+a youngster resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled in the
+jungle by night he was there for all mankind. With every year he became
+more and more definitely to himself a consecrated man as kings are
+consecrated. Only that he was self-consecrated, and anointed only in
+his heart. At last he was, so to speak, Haroun al Raschid again, going
+unsuspected about the world, because the palace of his security would
+not tell him the secrets of men's disorders. He was no longer a creature
+of circumstances, he was kingly, unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the
+Danes. In the great later accumulations of his Research the personal
+matter, the introspection, the intimate discussion of motive, becomes
+less and less. He forgets himself in the exaltation of kingliness. He
+worries less and less over the particular rightness of his
+definite acts. In these later papers White found Benham abstracted,
+self-forgetful, trying to find out with an ever increased
+self-detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why there are
+massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why we let famine, disease
+and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast multitudes in the
+midst of possible plenty. And when he found out and as far as he found
+out, he meant quite simply and earnestly to apply his knowledge....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The intellectualism of Benham intensified to the end. His definition of
+Prejudice impressed White as being the most bloodless and philosophical
+formula that ever dominated the mind of a man.
+
+“Prejudice,” Benham had written, “is that common incapacity of the human
+mind to understand that a difference in any respect is not a difference
+in all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by an instinctive
+hostility to what is unlike ourselves. We exaggerate classification and
+then charge it with mischievous emotion by referring it to ourselves.”
+ And under this comprehensive formula he proceeded to study and attack
+Family Prejudice, National Prejudice, Race Prejudice, War, Class
+Prejudice, Professional Prejudice, Sex Prejudice, in the most
+industrious and elaborate manner. Whether one regards one's self or
+others he held that these prejudices are evil things. “From the point
+of view of human welfare they break men up into wars and conflicts,
+make them an easy prey to those who trade upon suspicion and hostility,
+prevent sane collective co-operations, cripple and embitter life. From
+the point of view of personal aristocracy they make men vulgar, violent,
+unjust and futile. All the conscious life of the aristocrat must be a
+constant struggle against false generalizations; it is as much his duty
+to free himself from that as from fear, indulgence, and jealousy; it is
+a larger and more elaborate task, but it is none the less cardinal and
+essential. Indeed it is more cardinal and essential. The true knight has
+to be not only no coward, no self-pamperer, no egotist. He has to be a
+philosopher. He has to be no hasty or foolish thinker. His judgment no
+more than his courage is to be taken by surprise.
+
+“To subdue fear, desire and jealousy, is the aristocrat's personal
+affair, it is his ritual and discipline, like a knight watching his
+arms; but the destruction of division and prejudice and all their
+forms and establishments, is his real task, that is the common work of
+knighthood. It is a task to be done in a thousand ways; one man working
+by persuasion, another by example, this one overthrowing some crippling
+restraint upon the freedom of speech and the spread of knowledge,
+and that preparing himself for a war that will shatter a tyrannous
+presumption. Most imaginative literature, all scientific investigation,
+all sound criticism, all good building, all good manufacture, all sound
+politics, every honesty and every reasoned kindliness contribute to this
+release of men from the heat and confusions of our present world.”
+
+It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part of
+his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he was not
+making his own personal research alone, but, side by side with a vast,
+masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of others; that this great
+idea of his was under kindred forms the great idea of thousands, that
+it was breaking as the dawn breaks, simultaneously to great numbers of
+people, and that the time was not far off when the new aristocracy, the
+disguised rulers of the world, would begin to realize their common
+bent and effort. Into these latter papers there creeps more and more
+frequently a new phraseology, such expressions as the “Invisible King”
+ and the “Spirit of Kingship,” so that as Benham became personally more
+and more solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.
+
+Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of mankind.
+He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices worked, to get
+at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of prejudice, and to
+devise means for its treatment, destruction or neutralization. He had no
+great faith in the power of pure reasonableness; his psychological ideas
+were modern, and he had grasped the fact that the power of most of the
+great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual
+level. Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
+with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to
+discover their sub-rational springs.
+
+A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven
+Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience
+decided could not possibly “make a book,” consisted of notes and
+discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this
+or that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary
+trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in
+Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom he had his first really
+illuminating encounter with race and culture prejudice. His examination
+of the social and political condition of Russia seems to have left him
+much more hopeful than was the common feeling of liberal-minded people
+during the years of depression that followed the revolution of 1906, and
+it was upon the race question that his attention concentrated.
+
+The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India. Here in an entirely
+different environment was another discord of race and culture, and
+he found in his study of it much that illuminated and corrected his
+impressions of the Russian issue. A whole drawer was devoted to a
+comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into human dissensions
+in lower Bengal. Here there were not only race but culture conflicts,
+and he could work particularly upon the differences between men of the
+same race who were Hindus, Christians and Mahometans respectively.
+He could compare the Bengali Mahometan not only with the Bengali
+Brahminist, but also with the Mahometan from the north-west. “If one
+could scrape off all the creed and training, would one find much the
+same thing at the bottom, or something fundamentally so different that
+no close homogeneous social life and not even perhaps a life of just
+compromise is possible between the different races of mankind?”
+
+His answer to that was a confident one. “There are no such natural and
+unalterable differences in character and quality between any two sorts
+of men whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly co-operation in
+the world impossible,” he wrote.
+
+But he was not satisfied with his observations in India. He found the
+prevalence of caste ideas antipathetic and complicating. He went on
+after his last parting from Amanda into China, it was the first of
+several visits to China, and thence he crossed to America. White found a
+number of American press-cuttings of a vehemently anti-Japanese quality
+still awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it was clear to him that
+Benham had given a considerable amount of attention to the development
+of the “white” and “yellow” race hostility on the Pacific slope; but his
+chief interest at that time had been the negro. He went to Washington
+and thence south; he visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at
+a tangent to Hayti. He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid
+book, WHERE BLACK RULES WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able
+to visit that wonderful monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La
+Ferriere, the citadel built a century ago by the “Black Napoleon,” the
+Emperor Christophe. He went with a young American demonstrator from
+Harvard.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It was a memorable excursion. They rode from Cap Haytien for a day's
+journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of luxurious
+vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of unbridled jungle
+with populous country. They passed countless villages of thatched huts
+alive with curiosity and swarming with naked black children, and yet all
+the time they seemed to be in a wilderness. They forded rivers, they had
+at times to force themselves through thickets, once or twice they
+lost their way, and always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great
+mountain peak with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the
+background until it dominated the landscape. Long after dark they
+blundered upon rather than came to the village at its foot where they
+were to pass the night. They were interrogated under a flaring torch by
+peering ragged black soldiers, and passed through a firelit crowd into
+the presence of the local commandant to dispute volubly about their
+right to go further. They might have been in some remote corner of
+Nigeria. Their papers, laboriously got in order, were vitiated by the
+fact, which only became apparent by degrees, that the commandant could
+not read. They carried their point with difficulty.
+
+But they carried their point, and, watched and guarded by a hungry
+half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of
+trousers, they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of
+imperialism that humanity has ever made. The roads and parks and
+prospects constructed by this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long
+since disappeared, and the three men clambered for hours up ravines and
+precipitous jungle tracks, occasionally crossing the winding traces of
+a choked and ruined road that had once been the lordly approach to his
+fastness. Below they passed an abandoned palace of vast extent, a palace
+with great terraces and the still traceable outline of gardens, though
+there were green things pushing between the terrace steps, and trees
+thrust out of the empty windows. Here from a belvedere of which the
+skull-like vestige still remained, the negro Emperor Christophe, after
+fourteen years of absolute rule, had watched for a time the smoke of the
+burning of his cane-fields in the plain below, and then, learning that
+his bodyguard had deserted him, had gone in and blown out his brains.
+
+He had christened the place after the best of examples, “Sans Souci.”
+
+But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he never
+used. The defection of his guards made him abandon that. To build it,
+they say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives. He had the true Imperial
+lavishness. So high it was, so lost in a wilderness of trees and bush,
+looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch
+and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky--for even the
+guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in
+its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside its walls--and at the
+same time so huge and grandiose--there were walls thirty feet thick,
+galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls,
+king's apartments and queen's apartments, towering battlements and
+great arched doorways--that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and
+passing of that miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing
+of multitudes before one man and the transitoriness of such glories,
+more completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world
+before. Beneath the battlements--they are choked above with jungle grass
+and tamarinds and many flowery weeds--the precipice fell away a sheer
+two thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain populous and
+diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an amethystine wall.
+Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling his victims, and below
+this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons where men, broken and torn,
+thrust in at the neck-like hole above, starved and died: it was his
+headquarters here, here he had his torture chambers and the means for
+nameless cruelties....
+
+“Not a hundred years ago,” said Benham's companion, and told the story
+of the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.
+
+“Leap,” said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one
+questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last
+gesture of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed, and
+with a convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down through the
+shimmering air.
+
+Came presently the little faint sound of his fall.
+
+The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this
+projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and
+presently struggled and found itself still a living man. It could
+scramble down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for mercy.
+An hour and it stood before Christophe again, with an arm broken and
+bloody and a face torn, a battered thing now but with a faint flavour of
+pride in its bearing. “Your bidding has been done, Sire,” it said.
+
+“So,” said the Emperor, unappeased. “And you live? Well-- Leap
+again....”
+
+And then came other stories. The young man told them as he had heard
+them, stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men standing along
+the walls of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by one as the feast
+went on, of exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and his one note of
+wonder, his refrain was, “HERE! Not a hundred years ago.... It makes one
+almost believe that somewhere things of this sort are being done now.”
+
+They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins. The
+lizards which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the
+sunshine. The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his black
+fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a search for
+some saleable memento....
+
+Benham sat musing in silence. The thought of deliberate cruelty was
+always an actual physical distress to him. He sat bathed in the dreamy
+afternoon sunlight and struggled against the pictures that crowded
+into his mind, pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-driven men
+toiling in agony, and of the shame of extorted obedience and of cringing
+and crawling black figures, and the defiance of righteous hate beaten
+down under blow and anguish. He saw eyes alight with terror and lips
+rolled back in agony, he saw weary hopeless flight before striding proud
+destruction, he saw the poor trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in
+his soul....
+
+He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride, and
+then the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes Christophes
+but humility.
+
+There is in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his
+superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking
+individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience. Every natural
+sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a
+definite direction for his own partial life. At the bottom of his heart
+he feels, even if he does not know it definitely, that his life is
+partial. He is driven to join himself on. He obeys decision and the
+appearance of strength as a horse obeys its rider's voice. One thinks
+of the pride, the uncontrolled frantic will of this black ape of all
+Emperors, and one forgets the universal docility that made him possible.
+Usurpation is a crime to which men are tempted by human dirigibility.
+It is the orderly peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much
+restraint above as stiff insubordination below that has to be taught to
+men. There are kings and tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of
+the unkingliness of men.
+
+And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, Benham cast off from
+his mind his last tolerance for earthly kings and existing States, and
+expounded to another human being for the first time this long-cherished
+doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is the lord of human destiny,
+the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the sceptre and rule the
+earth.... To the young American's naive American response to any simply
+felt emotion, he seemed with his white earnestness and his glowing eyes
+a veritable prophet....
+
+“This is the root idea of aristocracy,” said Benham.
+
+“I have never heard the underlying spirit of democracy, the real true
+Thing in democracy, so thoroughly expressed,” said the young American.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Benham's notes on race and racial cultures gave White tantalizing
+glimpses of a number of picturesque experiences. The adventure in Kieff
+had first roused Benham to the reality of racial quality. He was caught
+in the wheels of a pogrom.
+
+“Before that time I had been disposed to minimize and deny race. I still
+think it need not prevent men from the completest social co-operation,
+but I see now better than I did how difficult it is for any man to purge
+from his mind the idea that he is not primarily a Jew, a Teuton, or a
+Kelt, but a man. You can persuade any one in five minutes that he or she
+belongs to some special and blessed and privileged sort of human
+being; it takes a lifetime to destroy that persuasion. There are these
+confounded differences of colour, of eye and brow, of nose or hair,
+small differences in themselves except that they give a foothold and
+foundation for tremendous fortifications of prejudice and tradition, in
+which hostilities and hatreds may gather. When I think of a Jew's nose,
+a Chinaman's eyes or a negro's colour I am reminded of that fatal little
+pit which nature has left in the vermiform appendix, a thing no use in
+itself and of no significance, but a gathering-place for mischief. The
+extremest case of race-feeling is the Jewish case, and even here, I am
+convinced, it is the Bible and the Talmud and the exertions of those
+inevitable professional champions who live upon racial feeling, far more
+than their common distinction of blood, which holds this people together
+banded against mankind.”
+
+Between the lines of such general propositions as this White read little
+scraps of intimation that linked with the things Benham let fall in
+Johannesburg to reconstruct the Kieff adventure.
+
+Benham had been visiting a friend in the country on the further side
+of the Dnieper. As they drove back along dusty stretches of road amidst
+fields of corn and sunflower and through bright little villages, they
+saw against the evening blue under the full moon a smoky red glare
+rising from amidst the white houses and dark trees of the town. “The
+pogrom's begun,” said Benham's friend, and was surprised when Benham
+wanted to end a pleasant day by going to see what happens after the
+beginning of a pogrom.
+
+He was to have several surprises before at last he left Benham in
+disgust and went home by himself.
+
+For Benham, with that hastiness that so flouted his exalted theories,
+passed rapidly from an attitude of impartial enquiry to active
+intervention. The two men left their carriage and plunged into
+the network of unlovely dark streets in which the Jews and traders
+harboured.... Benham's first intervention was on behalf of a crouching
+and yelping bundle of humanity that was being dragged about and kicked
+at a street corner. The bundle resolved itself into a filthy little old
+man, and made off with extraordinary rapidity, while Benham remonstrated
+with the kickers. Benham's tallness, his very Gentile face, his good
+clothes, and an air of tense authority about him had its effect, and
+the kickers shuffled off with remarks that were partly apologies. But
+Benham's friend revolted. This was no business of theirs.
+
+Benham went on unaccompanied towards the glare of the burning houses.
+
+For a time he watched. Black figures moved between him and the glare,
+and he tried to find out the exact nature of the conflict by enquiries
+in clumsy Russian. He was told that the Jews had insulted a religious
+procession, that a Jew had spat at an ikon, that the shop of a cheating
+Jew trader had been set on fire, and that the blaze had spread to the
+adjacent group of houses. He gathered that the Jews were running out of
+the burning block on the other side “like rats.” The crowd was mostly
+composed of town roughs with a sprinkling of peasants. They were
+mischievous but undecided. Among them were a number of soldiers, and
+he was surprised to see a policemen, brightly lit from head to foot,
+watching the looting of a shop that was still untouched by the flames.
+
+He held back some men who had discovered a couple of women's figures
+slinking along in the shadow beneath a wall. Behind his remonstrances
+the Jewesses escaped. His anger against disorder was growing upon
+him....
+
+Late that night Benham found himself the leading figure amidst a party
+of Jews who had made a counter attack upon a gang of roughs in a court
+that had become the refuge of a crowd of fugitives. Some of the young
+Jewish men had already been making a fight, rather a poor and hopeless
+fight, from the windows of the house near the entrance of the court, but
+it is doubtful if they would have made an effective resistance if it
+had not been for this tall excited stranger who was suddenly shouting
+directions to them in sympathetically murdered Russian. It was not that
+he brought powerful blows or subtle strategy to their assistance, but
+that he put heart into them and perplexity into his adversaries because
+he was so manifestly non-partizan. Nobody could ever have mistaken
+Benham for a Jew. When at last towards dawn a not too zealous governor
+called out the troops and began to clear the streets of rioters, Benham
+and a band of Jews were still keeping the gateway of that court behind a
+hasty but adequate barricade of furniture and handbarrows.
+
+The ghetto could not understand him, nobody could understand him, but it
+was clear a rare and precious visitor had come to their rescue, and he
+was implored by a number of elderly, dirty, but very intelligent-looking
+old men to stay with them and preserve them until their safety was
+assured.
+
+They could not understand him, but they did their utmost to entertain
+him and assure him of their gratitude. They seemed to consider him as
+a representative of the British Government, and foreign intervention on
+their behalf is one of those unfortunate fixed ideas that no persecuted
+Jews seem able to abandon.
+
+Benham found himself, refreshed and tended, sitting beside a wood fire
+in an inner chamber richly flavoured by humanity and listening to a
+discourse in evil but understandable German. It was a discourse upon the
+wrongs and the greatness of the Jewish people--and it was delivered by
+a compact middle-aged man with a big black beard and long-lashed but
+animated eyes. Beside him a very old man dozed and nodded approval. A
+number of other men crowded the apartment, including several who had
+helped to hold off the rioters from the court. Some could follow the
+talk and ever again endorsed the speaker in Yiddish or Russian; others
+listened with tantalized expressions, their brows knit, their lips
+moving.
+
+It was a discourse Benham had provoked. For now he was at the very heart
+of the Jewish question, and he could get some light upon the mystery
+of this great hatred at first hand. He did not want to hear tales of
+outrages, of such things he knew, but he wanted to understand what was
+the irritation that caused these things.
+
+So he listened. The Jew dilated at first on the harmlessness and
+usefulness of the Jews.
+
+“But do you never take a certain advantage?” Benham threw out.
+
+“The Jews are cleverer than the Russians. Must we suffer for that?”
+
+The spokesman went on to the more positive virtues of his race. Benham
+suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling of the Gentile who finds a bill
+being made against him. Did the world owe Israel nothing for Philo,
+Aron ben Asher, Solomon Gabriol, Halevy, Mendelssohn, Heine, Meyerbeer,
+Rubinstein, Joachim, Zangwill? Does Britain owe nothing to Lord
+Beaconsfield, Montefiore or the Rothschilds? Can France repudiate her
+debt to Fould, Gaudahaux, Oppert, or Germany to Furst, Steinschneider,
+Herxheimer, Lasker, Auerbach, Traube and Lazarus and Benfey?...
+
+Benham admitted under the pressure of urgent tones and gestures that
+these names did undoubtedly include the cream of humanity, but was it
+not true that the Jews did press a little financially upon the inferior
+peoples whose lands they honoured in their exile?
+
+The man with the black beard took up the challenge bravely.
+
+“They are merciful creditors,” he said. “And it is their genius to
+possess and control. What better stewards could you find for the wealth
+of nations than the Jews? And for the honours? That always had been the
+role of the Jews--stewardship. Since the days of Joseph in Egypt....”
+
+Then in a lower voice he went on to speak of the deficiencies of the
+Gentile population. He wished to be just and generous but the truth was
+the truth. The Christian Russians loved drink and laziness; they had no
+sense of property; were it not for unjust laws even now the Jews would
+possess all the land of South Russia....
+
+Benham listened with a kind of fascination. “But,” he said.
+
+It was so. And with a confidence that aroused a protest or so from the
+onlookers, the Jewish apologist suddenly rose up, opened a safe close
+beside the fire and produced an armful of documents.
+
+“Look!” he said, “all over South Russia there are these!”
+
+Benham was a little slow to understand, until half a dozen of these
+papers had been thrust into his hand. Eager fingers pointed, and several
+voices spoke. These things were illegalities that might some day be
+legal; there were the records of loans and hidden transactions that
+might at any time put all the surrounding soil into the hands of the
+Jew. All South Russia was mortgaged....
+
+“But is it so?” asked Benham, and for a time ceased to listen and stared
+into the fire.
+
+Then he held up the papers in his hand to secure silence and, feeling
+his way in unaccustomed German, began to speak and continued to speak in
+spite of a constant insurgent undertone of interruption from the Jewish
+spokesman.
+
+All men, Benham said, were brothers. Did they not remember Nathan the
+Wise?
+
+“I did not claim him,” said the spokesman, misunderstanding. “He is a
+character in fiction.”
+
+But all men are brothers, Benham maintained. They had to be merciful to
+one another and give their gifts freely to one another. Also they had
+to consider each other's weaknesses. The Jews were probably justified
+in securing and administering the property of every community into which
+they came, they were no doubt right in claiming to be best fitted for
+that task, but also they had to consider, perhaps more than they did,
+the feelings and vanities of the host population into which they brought
+these beneficent activities. What was said of the ignorance, incapacity
+and vice of the Roumanians and Russians was very generally believed and
+accepted, but it did not alter the fact that the peasant, for all his
+incapacity, did like to imagine he owned his own patch and hovel and did
+have a curious irrational hatred of debt....
+
+The faces about Benham looked perplexed.
+
+“THIS,” said Benham, tapping the papers in his hand. “They will not
+understand the ultimate benefit of it. It will be a source of anger
+and fresh hostility. It does not follow because your race has supreme
+financial genius that you must always follow its dictates to the
+exclusion of other considerations....”
+
+The perplexity increased.
+
+Benham felt he must be more general. He went on to emphasize the
+brotherhood of man, the right to equal opportunity, equal privilege,
+freedom to develop their idiosyncrasies as far as possible, unhindered
+by the idiosyncrasies of others. He could feel the sympathy and
+understanding of his hearers returning. “You see,” said Benham, “you
+must have generosity. You must forget ancient scores. Do you not see the
+world must make a fresh beginning?”
+
+He was entirely convinced he had them with him. The heads nodded assent,
+the bright eyes and lips followed the slow disentanglement of his bad
+German.
+
+“Free yourselves and the world,” he said.
+
+Applause.
+
+“And so,” he said breaking unconsciously into English, “let us begin by
+burning these BEASTLY mortgages!”
+
+And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the
+fire. The assenting faces became masks of horror. A score of hands
+clutched at those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger filled
+the room. Some one caught at his throat from behind. “Don't kill him!”
+ cried some one. “He fought for us!”
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled
+and battered condition to his hotel. He found his friend in anxious
+consultation with the hotel proprietor.
+
+“We were afraid that something had happened to you,” said his friend.
+
+“I got a little involved,” said Benham.
+
+“Hasn't some one clawed your cheek?”
+
+“Very probably,” said Benham.
+
+“And torn your coat? And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?”
+
+“It was a complicated misunderstanding,” said Benham. “Oh! pardon! I'm
+rather badly bruised upon that arm you're holding.”
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.
+
+“I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my point of
+view,” he said....
+
+“I'm not sure if they quite followed my German....
+
+“It's odd, too, that I remember saying, 'Let's burn these mortgages,'
+and at the time I'm almost sure I didn't know the German for
+mortgage....”
+
+It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to
+grasp the full intention behind Benham's proceedings. His aristocratic
+impulses were apt to run away with his conceptions of brotherhood, and
+time after time it was only too manifest to White that Benham's
+pallid flash of anger had astonished the subjects of his disinterested
+observations extremely. His explorations in Hayti had been terminated
+abruptly by an affair with a native policeman that had necessitated the
+intervention of the British Consul. It was begun with that suddenness
+that was too often characteristic of Benham, by his hitting the
+policeman. It was in the main street of Cap Haytien, and the policeman
+had just clubbed an unfortunate youth over the head with the heavily
+loaded wooden club which is the normal instrument of Haytien discipline.
+His blow was a repartee, part of a triangular altercation in which a
+large, voluble, mahogany-coloured lady whose head was tied up in a
+blue handkerchief played a conspicuous part, but it seemed to Benham an
+entirely unjustifiable blow.
+
+He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had been
+gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince to carry
+him away. He advanced with the kind of shout one would hurl at a dog,
+and smote the policeman to the earth with the stout stick that the
+peculiar social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him to carry. By the
+local standard his blow was probably a trivial one, but the moral effect
+of his indignant pallor and a sort of rearing tallness about him
+on these occasions was always very considerable. Unhappily these
+characteristics could have no effect on a second negro policeman who was
+approaching the affray from behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on
+the shoulder that was meant for the head, and with the assistance of his
+colleague overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.
+
+The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to the
+lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer's superior
+knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his British
+citizenship.
+
+The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German gunboat
+was still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed it that in
+spite of his blank refusal to compensate the man he had knocked over, he
+was after two days of anger, two days of extreme insanitary experience,
+and much meditation upon his unphilosophical hastiness, released.
+
+Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified his
+enquiries into Indian conditions. They too turned for the most part
+on his facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt desire for
+human brotherhood. At last indeed came an affair that refused ultimately
+to remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil that invoked newspaper
+articles and heated controversies.
+
+The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
+attraction and irritation. He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
+intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
+infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India
+into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to the
+other. “I came to see India,” he wrote, “and there is no India. There is
+a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin in the air,
+quietly scorning everybody else.”
+
+His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste began
+with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had turned an
+Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and culminated in
+a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness at Benares, who had
+thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham's shadow
+had fallen upon it.
+
+“You unendurable snob!” said Benham, and then lapsing into the forceful
+and inadvisable: “By Heaven, you SHALL eat it!...”
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Benham's detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep in
+his character as to seem almost instinctive. But he had too a very clear
+reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in human continuity
+in his sense of the gathering dangers they now involve. They had always,
+he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and the destruction
+of human dignity, but the new conditions of life that have been brought
+about by modern science were making them far more dangerous than they
+had ever been before. He believed that the evil and horror of war was
+becoming more and more tremendous with every decade, and that the free
+play of national prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness
+that seems to be inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate
+catastrophe, unless a real international aristocracy could be brought
+into being to prevent it.
+
+In the drawer full of papers labelled “Politics,” White found a paper
+called “The Metal Beast.” It showed that for a time Benham had been
+greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were in those days
+piling up in every country in Europe. He had gone to Essen, and at Essen
+he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great guns that
+were presently to smash the effete British fleet and open the Imperial
+way to London.
+
+“I could not sleep,” he wrote, “on account of this man and his talk and
+the streak of hatred in his talk. He distressed me not because he seemed
+exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary. I realized that he was more
+human than I was, and that only killing and killing could come out of
+such humanity. I thought of the great ugly guns I had seen, and of the
+still greater guns he had talked about, and how gloatingly he thought
+of the destruction they could do. I felt as I used to feel about that
+infernal stallion that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a
+despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in life. And this creature
+who had so disturbed me was only a beastly snuffy little man in an
+ill-fitting frock-coat, who laid his knife and fork by their tips on the
+edge of his plate, and picked his teeth with gusto and breathed into
+my face as he talked to me. The commonest of representative men. I went
+about that Westphalian country after that, with the conviction that
+headless, soulless, blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all
+about me. I felt that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest
+of black dragons. They were crouching here and away there in France and
+England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed
+up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks are
+hooded.... And I had never thought very much about them before, and
+there they were, waiting until some human fool like that frock-coated
+thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million, saw fit
+to call them out to action. Just out of hatred and nationalism and
+faction....”
+
+Then came a queer fancy.
+
+“Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see it
+more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for the
+happiness of life. It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous
+plot of the rebel metals against sensation. That is why in particular
+half-living people seem to love these things. La Ferriere was a fastness
+of the kind of tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny
+of the strong man over men. Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of
+the strong machine....
+
+“Science is either slave or master. These people--I mean the German
+people and militarist people generally--have no real mastery over the
+scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride. The monster
+of steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive. It
+has persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they must follow the
+logic of its path. Whither?... Only kingship will ever master that beast
+of steel which has got loose into the world. Nothing but the sense of
+unconquerable kingship in us all will ever dare withstand it.... Men
+must be kingly aristocrats--it isn't MAY be now, it is MUST be--or,
+these confederated metals, these things of chemistry and metallurgy,
+these explosives and mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of
+our race into mere red-streaked froth and filth....”
+
+Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast's release. Would
+it ever be given blood?
+
+“Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great war
+that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is with
+a note of incredulity that one tells oneself, 'After all this war may
+happen. But can it happen?'”
+
+He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war would
+ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident to White
+that he wanted very much to persuade himself against that idea. It was
+too disagreeable for him to think it probable. The paper was dated 1910.
+It was in October, 1914, that White, who was still working upon the
+laborious uncertain account of Benham's life and thought he has recently
+published, read what Benham had written. Benham concluded that the
+common-sense of the world would hold up this danger until reason could
+get “to the head of things.”
+
+“There are already mighty forces in Germany,” Benham wrote, “that will
+struggle very powerfully to avoid a war. And these forces increase.
+Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama and the
+display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble people.... I
+have talked with Germans of the better kind.... You cannot have a whole
+nation of Christophes.... There also the true knighthood discovers
+itself.... I do not believe this war will overtake us.”
+
+“WELL!” said White.
+
+“I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better,” the notes
+went on.
+
+But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve. Other
+things were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was too
+late for them....
+
+“It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over
+Europe, because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the blood of
+a people, because a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled.... Does
+no one see what that metallic beast will do if they once let it loose?
+It will trample cities; it will devour nations....”
+
+White read this on the 9th of October, 1914. One crumpled evening
+paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: “Rain of Incendiary
+Shells. Antwerp Ablaze.” Another declared untruthfully but impressively:
+“Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City.”
+
+He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and
+turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no
+data at all--as every one did at that time--before he was able to go on
+with Benham's manuscripts.
+
+These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like
+finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between the
+pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a
+heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill....
+
+“How can we ever begin over again?” said White, and sat for a long time
+staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too
+that men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to
+succeed them....
+
+“We have to begin over again,” said White at last, and took up Benham's
+papers where he had laid them down....
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth Limitation
+was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position. This
+section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the
+psychology of economic organization....
+
+It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important part
+played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of
+human affairs. This was a very natural result of his peculiar social
+circumstances. Most people born to wealth and ease take the established
+industrial system as the natural method in human affairs; it is only
+very reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and disinterestedness
+that they can be brought to realize that it is natural only in the sense
+that it has grown up and come about, and necessary only because nobody
+is strong and clever enough to rearrange it. Their experience of it is
+a satisfactory experience. On the other hand, the better off one is, the
+wider is one's outlook and the more alert one is to see the risks and
+dangers of international dissensions. Travel and talk to foreigners open
+one's eyes to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become
+conceivable. It is in the nature of things that socialists and labour
+parties should minimize international obligations and necessities, and
+equally so that autocracies and aristocracies and plutocracies should be
+negligent of and impatient about social reform.
+
+But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker and
+director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful humanity and
+enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned opportunity. It is a far
+profounder and subtler conflict than any other in human affairs. “I can
+foresee a time,” he wrote, “when the greater national and racial hatreds
+may all be so weakened as to be no longer a considerable source of human
+limitation and misery, when the suspicions of complexion and language
+and social habit are allayed, and when the element of hatred and
+aggression may be clean washed out of most religious cults, but I do not
+begin to imagine a time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there
+will not be great friction between those who employ, those who direct
+collective action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in
+industrialism. This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due
+very largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort of
+organization. Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass and
+self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so deeply
+seated, so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be cheerfully
+obedient and modestly directive in war time, there is no reason why
+ultimately they should not be so in the business of peace. But I do not
+understand the elements of the methods by which this state of affairs
+can be brought about.
+
+“If I were to confess this much to an intelligent working man I know
+that at once he would answer 'Socialism,' but Socialism is no more a
+solution of this problem than eating is a solution when one is lost in
+the wilderness and hungry. Of course everybody with any intelligence
+wants Socialism, everybody, that is to say, wants to see all human
+efforts directed to the common good and a common end, but brought face
+to face with practical problems Socialism betrays a vast insufficiency
+of practical suggestions. I do not say that Socialism would not work,
+but I do say that so far Socialists have failed to convince me that
+they could work it. The substitution of a stupid official for a greedy
+proprietor may mean a vanished dividend, a limited output and no
+other human advantage whatever. Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent
+gesture, inspiring, encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not very
+helpful, towards the vast problem of moral and material adjustment
+before the race. That problem is incurably miscellaneous and intricate,
+and only by great multitudes of generous workers, one working at this
+point and one at that, secretly devoted knights of humanity, hidden
+and dispersed kings, unaware of one another, doubting each his right
+to count himself among those who do these kingly services, is this
+elaborate rightening of work and guidance to be done.”
+
+So from these most fundamental social difficulties he came back to his
+panacea. All paths and all enquiries led him back to his conception of
+aristocracy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted, self-examining yet
+secret, making no personal nor class pretences, as the supreme need not
+only of the individual but the world.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal which had brought the two
+schoolfellows together again. White had been on his way to Zimbabwe.
+An emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had driven him to seek
+consolations in strange scenery and mysterious desolations. It was as if
+Zimbabwe called to him. Benham had come to South Africa to see into the
+question of Indian immigration, and he was now on his way to meet Amanda
+in London. Neither man had given much heed to the gathering social
+conflict on the Rand until the storm burst about them. There had been
+a few paragraphs in the papers about a dispute upon a point of labour
+etiquette, a question of the recognition of Trade Union officials, a
+thing that impressed them both as technical, and then suddenly a long
+incubated quarrel flared out in rioting and violence, the burning of
+houses and furniture, attacks on mines, attempts to dynamite trains.
+White stayed in Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded up
+country by the railway strike that was among the possibilities of
+the situation. Benham stayed because he was going to London very
+reluctantly, and he was glad of this justification for a few days'
+delay. The two men found themselves occupying adjacent tables in the
+Sherborough Hotel, and White was the first to recognize the other. They
+came together with a warmth and readiness of intimacy that neither would
+have displayed in London.
+
+White had not seen Benham since the social days of Amanda at Lancaster
+Gate, and he was astonished at the change a few years had made in him.
+The peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair had become more
+marked, his skin was deader, his features seemed more prominent and his
+expression intenser. His eyes were very bright and more sunken under his
+brows. He had suffered from yellow fever in the West Indies, and these
+it seemed were the marks left by that illness. And he was much more
+detached from the people about him; less attentive to the small
+incidents of life, more occupied with inner things. He greeted White
+with a confidence that White was one day to remember as pathetic.
+
+“It is good to meet an old friend,” Benham said. “I have lost friends.
+And I do not make fresh ones. I go about too much by myself, and I do
+not follow the same tracks that other people are following....”
+
+What track was he following? It was now that White first heard of the
+Research Magnificent. He wanted to know what Benham was doing, and
+Benham after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his interest
+in insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions. “It is, of
+course, a part of something else,” he amplified. He was writing a book,
+“an enormous sort of book.” He laughed with a touch of shyness. It
+was about “everything,” about how to live and how not to live. And
+“aristocracy, and all sorts of things.” White was always curious about
+other people's books. Benham became earnest and more explicit under
+encouragement, and to talk about his book was soon to talk about
+himself. In various ways, intentionally and inadvertently, he told White
+much. These chance encounters, these intimacies of the train and hotel,
+will lead men at times to a stark frankness of statement they would
+never permit themselves with habitual friends.
+
+About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little,
+considering how insistent it was becoming. But the wide propositions
+of the Research Magnificent, with its large indifference to immediate
+occurrences, its vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted
+very sharply in White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and
+resentment of the events about them. For him the thought of that first
+discussion of this vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was
+flowering, and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a
+fringe of vivid little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying
+on bicycles and afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring
+centres of disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, of the
+muffled galloping of troops through the broad dusty street in the night,
+of groups of men standing and watching down straight broad roads, roads
+that ended in groups of chimneys and squat buildings of corrugated iron.
+And once there was a marching body of white men in the foreground and a
+complicated wire fence, and a clustering mass of Kaffirs watching them
+over this fence and talking eagerly amongst themselves.
+
+“All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,”
+ said Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation....
+
+But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt that
+it was more than that. Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that
+eventful background while Benham talked to him.
+
+When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the
+background the greater share of his attention....
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that the
+full values came to very many things that Benham said during these last
+conversations. The papers fitted in with his memories of their long
+talks like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk had repeated
+the private writings in which he had first digested his ideas that it
+was presently almost impossible to disentangle what had been said and
+understood at Johannesburg from the fuller statement of those patched
+and corrected manuscripts. The two things merged in White's mind as he
+read. The written text took upon itself a resonance of Benham's
+voice; it eked out the hints and broken sentences of his remembered
+conversation.
+
+But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their
+mere marked absence an impression on White's mind. And occasionally
+after Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an
+occasional aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men who
+restrain themselves from betraying a preoccupation. He would say nothing
+about Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant to speak of
+Prothero, and another peculiarity was that he referred perhaps half a
+dozen times or more to the idea that he was a “prig.” He seemed to be
+defending himself against some inner accusation, some unconquerable
+doubt of the entire adventure of his life. These half hints and hints by
+omission exercised the quick intuitions of White's mind very keenly, and
+he drew far closer to an understanding of Benham's reserves than Benham
+ever suspected....
+
+At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
+completely justified in his treatment of her. She had betrayed him and
+he had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control. He had no doubt
+that he had punished her very effectively, and it was only after he had
+been travelling in China with Prothero for some time and in the light
+of one or two chance phrases in her letters that he began to have doubts
+whether he ought to have punished her at all. And one night at Shanghai
+he had a dream in which she stood before him, dishevelled and tearful,
+his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was dirty
+and shameful and spoilt for ever, because he had gone away from her.
+Afterwards the dream became absurd: she showed him the black leopard's
+fur as though it was a rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the
+leopard skin that had been so bright and wonderful such a little time
+ago, and he awoke before he could answer her, and for a long time he
+was full of unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate
+unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd. She had spoilt her
+own fur. But what was more penetrating and distressing in this dream was
+not so much the case Amanda stated as the atmosphere of unconquerable
+intimacy between them, as though they still belonged to each other,
+soul to soul, as though nothing that had happened afterwards could have
+destroyed their common responsibility and the common interest of their
+first unstinted union. She was hurt, and of course he was hurt. He began
+to see that his marriage to Amanda was still infinitely more than a
+technical bond.
+
+And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether she
+realized anything of the sort. Her letters fluctuated very much in tone,
+but at times they were as detached and guarded as a schoolgirl writing
+to a cousin. Then it seemed to Benham an extraordinary fraud on her
+part that she should presume to come into his dream with an entirely
+deceptive closeness and confidence. She began to sound him in these
+latter letters upon the possibility of divorce. This, which he had been
+quite disposed to concede in London, now struck him as an outrageous
+suggestion. He wrote to ask her why, and she responded exasperatingly
+that she thought it was “better.” But, again, why better? It is
+remarkable that although his mind had habituated itself to the idea that
+Easton was her lover in London, her thought of being divorced, no doubt
+to marry again, filled him with jealous rage. She asked him to take
+the blame in the divorce proceedings. There, again, he found himself
+ungenerous. He did not want to do that. Why should he do that? As a
+matter of fact he was by no means reconciled to the price he had paid
+for his Research Magnificent; he regretted his Amanda acutely. He was
+regretting her with a regret that grew when by all the rules of life it
+ought to be diminishing.
+
+It was in consequence of that regret and his controversies with Prothero
+while they travelled together in China that his concern about what he
+called priggishness arose. It is a concern that one may suppose has a
+little afflicted every reasonably self-conscious man who has turned from
+the natural passionate personal life to religion or to public service
+or any abstract devotion. These things that are at least more extensive
+than the interests of flesh and blood have a trick of becoming
+unsubstantial, they shine gloriously and inspiringly upon the
+imagination, they capture one and isolate one and then they vanish out
+of sight. It is far easier to be entirely faithful to friend or lover
+than it is to be faithful to a cause or to one's country or to a
+religion. In the glow of one's first service that larger idea may be as
+closely spontaneous as a handclasp, but in the darkness that comes as
+the glow dies away there is a fearful sense of unreality. It was in such
+dark moments that Benham was most persecuted by his memories of Amanda
+and most distressed by this suspicion that the Research Magnificent was
+a priggishness, a pretentious logomachy. Prothero could indeed hint as
+much so skilfully that at times the dream of nobility seemed an insult
+to the sunshine, to the careless laughter of children, to the good light
+in wine and all the warm happiness of existence. And then Amanda would
+peep out of the dusk and whisper, “Of course if you could leave me--!
+Was I not LIFE? Even now if you cared to come back to me-- For I loved
+you best and loved you still, old Cheetah, long after you had left me to
+follow your dreams.... Even now I am drifting further into lies and the
+last shreds of dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful
+leopard I am now, who was once clean and bright.... You could come back,
+Cheetah, and you could save me yet. If you would love me....”
+
+In certain moods she could wring his heart by such imagined speeches,
+the very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that his ear had
+loved, and not only could she distress him, but when Benham was in this
+heartache mood, when once she had set him going, then his little mother
+also would rise against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue eyes
+bright with tears; and his frowsty father would back towards him and
+sit down complaining that he was neglected, and even little Mrs.
+Skelmersdale would reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking after
+him as he slunk away from her through Kensington Gardens; indeed every
+personal link he had ever had to life could in certain moods pull him
+back through the door of self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching
+and accusing himself of harshness and self-concentration. The very
+kittens of his childhood revived forgotten moments of long-repented
+hardness. For a year before Prothero was killed there were these
+heartaches. That tragedy gave them their crowning justification. All
+these people said in this form or that, “You owed a debt to us, you
+evaded it, you betrayed us, you owed us life out of yourself, love and
+services, and you have gone off from us all with this life that was
+ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of the world,
+and with empty phantoms of power and destiny. All this was
+intellectualization. You sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind.
+There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like you
+may lay hold upon. The rule of the world is a fortuitous result of
+incalculably multitudinous forces. But all of us you could have made
+happier. You could have spared us distresses. Prothero died because of
+you. Presently it will be the turn of your father, your mother--Amanda
+perhaps....”
+
+He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several memoranda
+about priggishness that White read and came near to understanding. In
+spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was making up his mind
+to be a prig. He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness
+against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate
+sympathy for Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and
+he made his choice. But it was a reluctant choice.
+
+One fragment began in the air. “Of course I had made myself responsible
+for her life. But it was, you see, such a confoundedly energetic life,
+as vigorous and as slippery as an eel.... Only by giving all my strength
+to her could I have held Amanda.... So what was the good of trying to
+hold Amanda?...
+
+“All one's people have this sort of claim upon one. Claims made by their
+pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and dependences.
+You've no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom when
+it means snapping and tearing the silly suffering tendrils they have
+wrapped about you. The true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp,
+enough steadiness, to be kind and right to every human being and still
+do the work that ought to be his essential life. I see that now.
+It's one of the things this last year or so of loneliness has made me
+realize; that in so far as I have set out to live the aristocratic life
+I have failed. Instead I've discovered it--and found myself out. I'm an
+overstrung man. I go harshly and continuously for one idea. I live as I
+ride. I blunder through my fences, I take off too soon. I've no natural
+ease of mind or conduct or body. I am straining to keep hold of a thing
+too big for me and do a thing beyond my ability. Only after Prothero's
+death was it possible for me to realize the prig I have always been,
+first as regards him and then as regards Amanda and my mother and every
+one. A necessary unavoidable priggishness....” I do not see how
+certain things can be done without prigs, people, that is to say, so
+concentrated and specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so
+resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced.... All things must begin
+with clumsiness, there is no assurance about pioneers....
+
+“Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain
+aristocracy.... But the very essence of aristocracy, as I conceive it,
+is that it does not explain nor talk about itself....
+
+“After all it doesn't matter what I am.... It's just a private vexation
+that I haven't got where I meant to get. That does not affect the truth
+I have to tell....
+
+“If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one must
+speak the truth. I have worked out some very considerable things in my
+research, and the time has come when I must set them out clearly and
+plainly. That is my job anyhow. My journey to London to release Amanda
+will be just the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my real
+life. It will release me from my last entanglement with the fellow
+creatures I have always failed to make happy.... It's a detail in the
+work.... And I shall go on.
+
+“But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical
+operation.
+
+“It's very like that. A surgical operation, and when it is over perhaps
+I shall think no more about it.
+
+“And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done. So
+far I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of living. I
+must begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can upon the details,
+and, presently, I shall see more clearly where other men are working to
+the same ends....”
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+Benham's expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle
+between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble life to
+the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and sympathy for
+the earthliness of that inglorious little don. Although Benham insisted
+upon the dominance of life by noble imaginations and relentless
+reasonableness, he would never altogether abandon the materialism of
+life. Prothero had once said to him, “You are the advocate of the brain
+and I of the belly. Only, only we respect each other.” And at another
+time, “You fear emotions and distrust sensations. I invite them. You do
+not drink gin because you think it would make you weep. But if I could
+not weep in any other way I would drink gin.” And it was under
+the influence of Prothero that Benham turned from the haughty
+intellectualism, the systematized superiorities and refinements, the
+caste marks and defensive dignities of India to China, that great
+teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow humanity.
+
+Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout of elevated idealism.
+It was only very slowly that he reconciled his mind to the idea of an
+entirely solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream. For some time as
+he went about the world he was trying to bring himself into relationship
+with the advanced thinkers, the liberal-minded people who seemed to
+promise at least a mental and moral co-operation. Yet it is difficult to
+see what co-operation was possible unless it was some sort of agreement
+that presently they should all shout together. And it was after a
+certain pursuit of Rabindranath Tagore, whom he met in Hampstead, that a
+horror of perfect manners and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled
+from that starry calm to the rich uncleanness of the most undignified
+fellow of Trinity. And as an advocate and exponent of the richness of
+the lower levels of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of
+the uttermost refinements of pride, Prothero went with Benham by way of
+Siberia to the Chinese scene.
+
+Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner-table in their
+choice of food and drink. Benham was always wary and Prothero always
+appreciative. It peeped out in the distribution of their time, in the
+direction of their glances. Whenever women walked about, Prothero gave
+way to a sort of ethnological excitement. “That girl--a wonderful racial
+type.” But in Moscow he was sentimental. He insisted on going again to
+the Cosmopolis Bazaar, and when he had ascertained that Anna Alexievna
+had vanished and left no trace he prowled the streets until the small
+hours.
+
+In the eastward train he talked intermittently of her. “I should have
+defied Cambridge,” he said.
+
+But at every stopping station he got out upon the platform
+ethnologically alert....
+
+Theoretically Benham was disgusted with Prothero. Really he was not
+disgusted at all. There was something about Prothero like a sparrow,
+like a starling, like a Scotch terrier.... These, too, are morally
+objectionable creatures that do not disgust....
+
+Prothero discoursed much upon the essential goodness of Russians. He
+said they were a people of genius, that they showed it in their faults
+and failures just as much as in their virtues and achievements. He
+extolled the “germinating disorder” of Moscow far above the “implacable
+discipline” of Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a base
+materialist people, could so maintain its attention upon precision and
+cleanliness. Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. “But all
+exaltation neglects,” said Prothero. “No religion has ever boasted that
+its saints were spick and span.” This controversy raged between them in
+the streets of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked their way
+through the indescribable filth of Pekin.
+
+“You say that all this is a fine disdain for material things,” said
+Benham. “But look out there!”
+
+Apt to their argument a couple of sturdy young women came shuffling
+along, cleaving the crowd in the narrow street by virtue of a single
+word and two brace of pails of human ordure.
+
+“That is not a fine disdain for material things,” said Benham. “That is
+merely individualism and unsystematic living.”
+
+“A mere phase of frankness. Only frankness is left to them now. The
+Manchus crippled them, spoilt their roads and broke their waterways.
+European intervention paralyses every attempt they make to establish
+order on their own lines. In the Ming days China did not reek.... And,
+anyhow, Benham, it's better than the silly waste of London....”
+
+And in a little while Prothero discovered that China had tried Benham
+and found him wanting, centuries and dynasties ago.
+
+What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he asked, but the ideal of
+Confucius, the superior person, “the son of the King”? There you had the
+very essence of Benham, the idea of self-examination, self-preparation
+under a vague Theocracy. (“Vaguer,” said Benham, “for the Confucian
+Heaven could punish and reward.”) Even the elaborate sham modesty of the
+two dreams was the same. Benham interrupted and protested with heat. And
+this Confucian idea of the son of the King, Prothero insisted, had been
+the cause of China's paralysis. “My idea of nobility is not traditional
+but expectant,” said Benham. “After all, Confucianism has held together
+a great pacific state far longer than any other polity has ever lasted.
+I'll accept your Confucianism. I've not the slightest objection to
+finding China nearer salvation than any other land. Do but turn it round
+so that it looks to the future and not to the past, and it will be the
+best social and political culture in the world. That, indeed, is what
+is happening. Mix Chinese culture with American enterprise and you will
+have made a new lead for mankind.”
+
+From that Benham drove on to discoveries. “When a man thinks of the past
+he concentrates on self; when he thinks of the future he radiates from
+self. Call me a neo-Confucian; with the cone opening forward away from
+me, instead of focussing on me....”
+
+“You make me think of an extinguisher,” said Prothero.
+
+“You know I am thinking of a focus,” said Benham. “But all your thought
+now has become caricature.... You have stopped thinking. You are
+fighting after making up your mind....”
+
+Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham's prompt endorsement of his
+Chinese identification. He had hoped it would be exasperating. He tried
+to barb his offence. He amplified the indictment. All cultures must
+be judged by their reaction and fatigue products, and Confucianism had
+produced formalism, priggishness, humbug.... No doubt its ideals had had
+their successes; they had unified China, stamped the idea of universal
+peace and good manners upon the greatest mass of population in the
+world, paved the way for much beautiful art and literature and living.
+“But in the end, all your stern orderliness, Benham,” said Prothero,
+“only leads to me. The human spirit rebels against this everlasting
+armour on the soul. After Han came T'ang. Have you never read Ling Po?
+There's scraps of him in English in that little book you have--what is
+it?--the LUTE OF JADE? He was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam
+after the Prophet. Life must relax at last....”
+
+“No!” cried Benham. “If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it is
+creative, no....”
+
+Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven to
+closer enquiries into Chinese thought. He tried particularly to get to
+mental grips with English-speaking Chinese. “We still know nothing of
+China,” said Prothero. “Most of the stuff we have been told about this
+country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle. We send merchants from
+Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what doesn't remind them of
+these delectable standards seems either funny to them or wicked. I admit
+the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to speak, in the ancient characters
+and the ancient traditions, but for all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what
+all the rest of the world has still to find and get. When they begin to
+speak and write in a modern way and handle modern things and break into
+the soil they have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find
+just how much it is behind.... Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not
+such fools as that, but LIFE....”
+
+Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.
+
+He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
+wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
+foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities, delirious
+religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with loaded
+guns, China, even more than America, develops steadily into a massive
+possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism....
+
+The two men followed their associated and disconnected paths. Through
+Benham's chance speeches and notes, White caught glimpses, as one might
+catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that bilateral adventure. He
+saw Benham in conversation with liberal-minded mandarins, grave-faced,
+bald-browed persons with disciplined movements, who sat with their hands
+thrust into their sleeves talking excellent English; while Prothero
+pursued enquiries of an intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of
+a more confidential type. And, presently, Prothero began to discover and
+discuss the merits of opium.
+
+For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, if one is to
+find the solution of life's problem in the rational enjoyment of one's
+sensations, why should one not use opium? It is art materialized.
+It gives tremendous experiences with a minimum of exertion, and if
+presently its gifts diminish one need but increase the quantity.
+Moreover, it quickens the garrulous mind, and steadies the happiness of
+love. Across the varied adventures of Benham's journey in China fell the
+shadow first of a suspicion and then of a certainty....
+
+The perfected and ancient vices of China wrapped about Prothero like
+some tainted but scented robe, and all too late Benham sought to drag
+him away. And then in a passion of disgust turned from him.
+
+“To this,” cried Benham, “one comes! Save for pride and fierceness!”
+
+“Better this than cruelty,” said Prothero talking quickly and clearly
+because of the evil thing in his veins. “You think that you are the only
+explorer of life, Benham, but while you toil up the mountains I board
+the house-boat and float down the stream. For you the stars, for me the
+music and the lanterns. You are the son of a mountaineering don, and I
+am a Chinese philosopher of the riper school. You force yourself beyond
+fear of pain, and I force myself beyond fear of consequences. What
+are we either of us but children groping under the black cloak of our
+Maker?--who will not blind us with his light. Did he not give us also
+these lusts, the keen knife and the sweetness, these sensations that are
+like pineapple smeared with saltpetre, like salted olives from heaven,
+like being flayed with delight.... And did he not give us dreams
+fantastic beyond any lust whatever? What is the good of talking? Speak
+to your own kind. I have gone, Benham. I am lost already. There is
+no resisting any more, since I have drugged away resistance. Why then
+should I come back? I know now the symphonies of the exalted nerves; I
+can judge; and I say better lie and hear them to the end than come back
+again to my old life, to my little tin-whistle solo, my--effort! My
+EFFORT!... I ruin my body. I know. But what of that?... I shall soon be
+thin and filthy. What of the grape-skin when one has had the pulp?”
+
+“But,” said Benham, “the cleanness of life!”
+
+“While I perish,” said Prothero still more wickedly, “I say good
+things....”
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+White had a vision of a great city with narrow crowded streets, hung
+with lank banners and gay with vertical vermilion labels, and of a
+pleasant large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, a garden
+set with artificial stones and with beasts and men and lanterns of white
+porcelain, a garden which overlooked this city. Here it was that Benham
+stayed and talked with his host, a man robed in marvellous silks and
+subtle of speech even in the European languages he used, and meanwhile
+Prothero, it seemed, had gone down into the wickedness of the town
+below. It was a very great town indeed, spreading for miles along the
+banks of a huge river, a river that divided itself indolently into three
+shining branches so as to make islands of the central portion of the
+place. And on this river swarmed for ever a vast flotilla of ships and
+boats, boats in which people lived, boats in which they sought pleasure,
+moored places of assembly, high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger
+sampans, cargo craft, such a water town in streets and lanes, endless
+miles of it, as no other part of the world save China can display. In
+the daylight it was gay with countless sunlit colours embroidered upon
+a fabric of yellow and brown, at night it glittered with a hundred
+thousand lights that swayed and quivered and were reflected quiveringly
+upon the black flowing waters.
+
+And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger who
+was for some reason very vividly realized by White's imagination. He was
+a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken cheeks that made his cheek
+bones very prominent, and gave his thin-lipped mouth something of the
+geniality of a skull, and the arm he thrust out of his yellow robe to
+hand Prothero's message to Benham was lean as a pole. So he stood out in
+White's imagination, against the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs
+and blue haze of the great town below, and was with one exception the
+distinctest thing in the story. The message he bore was scribbled by
+Prothero himself in a nerveless scrawl: “Send a hundred dollars by this
+man. I am in a frightful fix.”
+
+Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage of
+opium, and something in this message stirred his facile indignation.
+Twice before he had had similar demands. And on the whole they had
+seemed to him to be unreasonable demands. He was astonished that while
+he was sitting and talking of the great world-republic of the future and
+the secret self-directed aristocracy that would make it possible,
+his own friend, his chosen companion, should thus, by this inglorious
+request and this ungainly messenger, disavow him. He felt a wave of
+intense irritation.
+
+“No,” he said, “I will not.”
+
+And he was too angry to express himself in any language understandable
+by his messenger.
+
+His host intervened and explained after a few questions that the
+occasion was serious. Prothero, it seemed, had been gambling.
+
+“No,” said Benham. “He is shameless. Let him do what he can.”
+
+The messenger was still reluctant to go.
+
+And scarcely had he gone before misgivings seized Benham.
+
+“Where IS your friend?” asked the mandarin.
+
+“I don't know,” said Benham.
+
+“But they will keep him! They may do all sorts of things when they find
+he is lying to them.”
+
+“Lying to them?”
+
+“About your help.”
+
+“Stop that man,” cried Benham suddenly realizing his mistake. But
+when the servants went to stop the messenger their intentions were
+misunderstood, and the man dashed through the open gate of the garden
+and made off down the winding road.
+
+“Stop him!” cried Benham, and started in pursuit, suddenly afraid for
+Prothero.
+
+The Chinese are a people of great curiosity, and a small pebble
+sometimes starts an avalanche....
+
+White pieced together his conception of the circles of disturbance that
+spread out from Benham's pursuit of Prothero's flying messenger.
+
+For weeks and months the great town had been uneasy in all its ways
+because of the insurgent spirits from the south and the disorder from
+the north, because of endless rumours and incessant intrigue. The stupid
+manoeuvres of one European “power” against another, the tactlessness of
+missionaries, the growing Chinese disposition to meet violence and force
+with violence and force, had fermented and brewed the possibility of an
+outbreak. The sudden resolve of Benham to get at once to Prothero was
+like the firing of a mine. This tall, pale-faced, incomprehensible
+stranger charging through the narrow streets that led to the
+pleasure-boats in the south river seemed to many a blue-clad citizen
+like the White Peril embodied. Behind him came the attendants of
+the rich man up the hill; but they surely were traitors to help this
+stranger.
+
+Before Benham could at all realize what was happening he found his way
+to the river-boat on which he supposed Prothero to be detained, barred
+by a vigorous street fight. Explanations were impossible; he joined in
+the fight.
+
+For three days that fight developed round the mystery of Prothero's
+disappearance.
+
+It was a complicated struggle into which the local foreign traders
+on the river-front and a detachment of modern drilled troops from the
+up-river barracks were presently drawn. It was a struggle that was never
+clearly explained, and at the end of it they found Prothero's body flung
+out upon a waste place near a little temple on the river bank, stabbed
+while he was asleep....
+
+And from the broken fragments of description that Benham let fall, White
+had an impression of him hunting for all those three days through the
+strange places of a Chinese city, along narrow passages, over queer
+Venetian-like bridges, through the vast spaces of empty warehouses, in
+the incense-scented darkness of temple yards, along planks that passed
+to the dark hulls of secret barges, in quick-flying boats that slipped
+noiselessly among the larger craft, and sometimes he hunted alone,
+sometimes in company, sometimes black figures struggled in the darkness
+against dim-lit backgrounds and sometimes a swarm of shining yellow
+faces screamed and shouted through the torn paper windows.... And
+then at the end of this confused effect of struggle, this Chinese
+kinematograph film, one last picture jerked into place and stopped and
+stood still, a white wall in the sunshine come upon suddenly round a
+corner, a dirty flagged passage and a stiff crumpled body that had for
+the first time an inexpressive face....
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+Benham sat at a table in the smoking-room of the Sherborough Hotel
+at Johannesburg and told of these things. White watched him from an
+armchair. And as he listened he noted again the intensification of
+Benham's face, the darkness under his brows, the pallor of his skin, the
+touch of red in his eyes. For there was still that red gleam in Benham's
+eyes; it shone when he looked out of a darkness into a light. And he
+sat forward with his arms folded under him, or moved his long lean hand
+about over the things on the table.
+
+“You see,” he said, “this is a sort of horror in my mind. Things like
+this stick in my mind. I am always seeing Prothero now, and it will take
+years to get this scar off my memory again. Once before--about a horse,
+I had the same kind of distress. And it makes me tender, sore-minded
+about everything. It will go, of course, in the long run, and it's just
+like any other ache that lays hold of one. One can't cure it. One has to
+get along with it....
+
+“I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, but how was I to know
+then that it was so imperative to send that money?...
+
+“At the time it seemed just pandering to his vices....
+
+“I was angry. I shall never subdue that kind of hastiness altogether.
+It takes me by surprise. Before the messenger was out of sight I had
+repented....
+
+“I failed him. I have gone about in the world dreaming of tremendous
+things and failing most people. My wife too....”
+
+He stopped talking for a little time and folded his arms tight and
+stared hard in front of himself, his lips compressed.
+
+“You see, White,” he said, with a kind of setting of the teeth, “this
+is the sort of thing one has to stand. Life is imperfect. Nothing can be
+done perfectly. And on the whole--” He spoke still more slowly, “I would
+go through again with the very same things that have hurt my people. If
+I had to live over again. I would try to do the things without hurting
+the people, but I would do the things anyhow. Because I'm raw with
+remorse, it does not follow that on the whole I am not doing right.
+Right doing isn't balm. If I could have contrived not to hurt these
+people as I have done, it would have been better, just as it would be
+better to win a battle without any killed or wounded. I was clumsy with
+them and they suffered, I suffer for their suffering, but still I have
+to stick to the way I have taken. One's blunders are accidents. If
+one thing is clearer than another it is that the world isn't
+accident-proof....
+
+“But I wish I had sent those dollars to Prothero.... God! White, but
+I lie awake at night thinking of that messenger as he turned away....
+Trying to stop him....
+
+“I didn't send those dollars. So fifty or sixty people were killed
+and many wounded.... There for all practical purposes the thing ends.
+Perhaps it will serve to give me a little charity for some other fool's
+haste and blundering....
+
+“I couldn't help it, White. I couldn't help it....
+
+“The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes on. One thinks, one learns,
+one adds one's contribution of experience and understanding. The spirit
+of the race goes on to light and comprehension. In spite of accidents.
+In spite of individual blundering.
+
+“It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that nobility is so easy as to
+come slick and true on every occasion....
+
+“If one gives oneself to any long aim one must reckon with minor
+disasters. This Research I undertook grows and grows. I believe in it
+more and more. The more it asks from me the more I give to it. When I
+was a youngster I thought the thing I wanted was just round the corner.
+I fancied I would find out the noble life in a year or two, just what
+it was, just where it took one, and for the rest of my life I would live
+it. Finely. But I am just one of a multitude of men, each one going a
+little wrong, each one achieving a little right. And the noble life is
+a long, long way ahead.... We are working out a new way of living for
+mankind, a new rule, a new conscience. It's no small job for all of us.
+There must be lifetimes of building up and lifetimes of pulling down and
+trying again. Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy....
+I see myself now for the little workman I am upon this tremendous
+undertaking. And all my life hereafter goes to serve it....”
+
+He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend. He spoke with a grim
+enthusiasm. “I'm a prig. I'm a fanatic, White. But I have something
+clear, something better worth going on with than any adventure of
+personal relationship could possibly be....”
+
+And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the faith
+that had grown up in his mind. He spoke with a touch of defiance, with
+the tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame. “I will
+tell you what I believe.”
+
+He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow
+development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect
+until he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he refers
+his life to ends and purposes beyond himself. An aristocrat must be
+loyal. So it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must also be
+lucid; there it is that one has at once the demand for kingship and the
+repudiation of all existing states and kings. In this manner he had
+come to his idea of a great world republic that must replace the little
+warring kingdoms of the present, to the conception of an unseen kingship
+ruling the whole globe, to his King Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth
+and all sane loyalty. “There,” he said, “is the link of our order, the
+new knighthood, the new aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth.
+There is our Prince. He is in me, he is in you; he is latent in all
+mankind. I have worked this out and tried it and lived it, and I know
+that outwardly and inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else be
+a poor thing and a base one. On great occasions and small occasions I
+have failed myself a thousand times, but no failure lasts if your faith
+lasts. What I have learnt, what I have thought out and made sure, I
+want now to tell the world. Somehow I will tell it, as a book I suppose,
+though I do not know if I shall ever be able to make a book. But I have
+away there in London or with me here all the masses of notes I have
+made in my search for the life that is worth while living.... We who are
+self-appointed aristocrats, who are not ashamed of kingship, must speak
+to one another....
+
+“We can have no organization because organizations corrupt....
+
+“No recognition....
+
+“But we can speak plainly....”
+
+(As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and voices
+of mounted police riding past the hotel.)
+
+“But on one side your aristocracy means revolution,” said White. “It
+becomes a political conspiracy.”
+
+“Manifestly. An open conspiracy. It denies the king upon the stamps and
+the flag upon the wall. It is the continual proclamation of the Republic
+of Mankind.”
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+The earlier phases of violence in the Rand outbreak in 1913 were
+manifest rather in the outskirts of Johannesburg than at the centre.
+“Pulling out” was going on first at this mine and then that, there were
+riots in Benoni, attacks on strike breakers and the smashing up of
+a number of houses. It was not until July the 4th that, with the
+suppression of a public meeting in the market-place, Johannesburg itself
+became the storm centre.
+
+Benham and White were present at this marketplace affair, a confused
+crowded occasion, in which a little leaven of active men stirred through
+a large uncertain multitude of decently dressed onlookers. The whole
+big square was astir, a swaying crowd of men. A ramshackle platform
+improvised upon a trolley struggled through the swarming straw hats to a
+street corner, and there was some speaking. At first it seemed as though
+military men were using this platform, and then it was manifestly in
+possession of an excited knot of labour leaders with red rosettes. The
+military men had said their say and got down. They came close by Benham,
+pushing their way across the square. “We've warned them,” said one. A
+red flag, like some misunderstood remark at a tea-party, was fitfully
+visible and incomprehensible behind the platform. Somebody was either
+pitched or fell off the platform. One could hear nothing from the
+speakers except a minute bleating....
+
+Then there were shouts that the police were charging. A number of
+mounted men trotted into the square. The crowd began a series of short
+rushes that opened lanes for the passage of the mounted police as they
+rode to and fro. These men trotted through the crowd, scattering knots
+of people. They carried pick-handles, but they did not seem to be
+hitting with them. It became clear that they aimed at the capture of
+the trolley. There was only a feeble struggle for the trolley; it was
+captured and hauled through the scattered spectators in the square
+to the protection of a small impassive body of regular cavalry at the
+opposite corner. Then quite a number of people seemed to be getting
+excited and fighting. They appeared to be vaguely fighting the
+foot-police, and the police seemed to be vaguely pushing through
+them and dispersing them. The roof of a little one-story shop became
+prominent as a centre of vigorous stone-throwing.
+
+It was no sort of battle. Merely the normal inconsecutiveness of human
+affairs had become exaggerated and pugnacious. A meeting was being
+prevented, and the police engaged in the operation were being pelted or
+obstructed. Mostly people were just looking on.
+
+“It amounts to nothing,” said Benham. “Even if they held a meeting, what
+could happen? Why does the Government try to stop it?”
+
+The drifting and charging and a little booing went on for some time.
+Every now and then some one clambered to a point of vantage, began
+a speech and was pulled down by policemen. And at last across the
+confusion came an idea, like a wind across a pond.
+
+The strikers were to go to the Power Station.
+
+That had the effect of a distinct move in the game. The Power Station
+was the centre of Johannesburg's light and energy. There if anywhere it
+would be possible to express one's disapproval of the administration,
+one's desire to embarrass and confute it. One could stop all sorts of
+things from the Power Station. At any rate it was a repartee to the
+suppression of the meeting. Everybody seemed gladdened by a definite
+project.
+
+Benham and White went with the crowd.
+
+At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the
+scattered drift of people became congested. Gliding slowly across the
+mass came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with even its
+glass undamaged, and then another and another. Strikers, with the
+happy expression of men who have found something expressive to do, were
+escorting the trams off the street. They were being meticulously careful
+with them. Never was there less mob violence in a riot. They walked by
+the captured cars almost deferentially, like rough men honoured by a
+real lady's company. And when White and Benham reached the Power House
+the marvel grew. The rioters were already in possession and going freely
+over the whole place, and they had injured nothing. They had stopped
+the engines, but they had not even disabled them. Here too manifestly a
+majority of the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.
+
+“But this is the most civilized rioting,” said Benham. “It isn't
+rioting; it's drifting. Just as things drifted in Moscow. Because nobody
+has the rudder....
+
+“What maddens me,” he said, “is the democracy of the whole thing. White!
+I HATE this modern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was there ever
+an absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the
+men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the
+same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the
+conceit that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just
+a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an
+inkling of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all
+this squalor and evil temper.... What does all this struggle here amount
+to? On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the
+other; suspicion everywhere....
+
+“And you know, White, at bottom THEY ALL WANT TO BE DECENT!
+
+“If only they had light enough in their brains to show them how.
+It's such a plain job they have here too, a new city, the simplest
+industries, freedom from war, everything to make a good life for men,
+prosperity, glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in the air. And
+mismanagement, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, stupidity, poison
+it all. A squabble about working on a Saturday afternoon, a squabble
+embittered by this universal shadow of miner's phthisis that the masters
+were too incapable and too mean to prevent.
+
+“Oh, God!” cried Benham, “when will men be princes and take hold of
+life? When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own?... Look
+at this place! Look at this place!... The easy, accessible happiness!
+The manifest prosperity. The newness and the sunshine. And the silly
+bitterness, the rage, the mischief and miseries!...”
+
+And then: “It's not our quarrel....”
+
+“It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides.
+Life is one long struggle against the incidental. I can feel my anger
+gathering against the Government here in spite of my reason. I want to
+go and expostulate. I have a ridiculous idea that I ought to go off to
+Lord Gladstone or Botha and expostulate.... What good would it do?
+They move in the magic circles of their own limitations, an official, a
+politician--how would they put it?--'with many things to consider....'
+
+“It's my weakness to be drawn into quarrels. It's a thing I have to
+guard against....
+
+“What does it all amount to? It is like a fight between navvies in
+a tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star. It doesn't concern
+us.... Oh! it doesn't indeed concern us. It's a scuffle in the darkness,
+and our business, the business of all brains, the only permanent good
+work is to light up the world.... There will be mischief and hatred
+here and suppression and then forgetfulness, and then things will go on
+again, a little better or a little worse....”
+
+“I'm tired of this place, White, and of all such places. I'm tired of
+the shouting and running, the beating and shooting. I'm sick of all the
+confusions of life's experience, which tells only of one need amidst an
+endless multitude of distresses. I've seen my fill of wars and disputes
+and struggles. I see now how a man may grow weary at last of life and
+its disorders, its unreal exacting disorders, its blunders and its
+remorse. No! I want to begin upon the realities I have made for myself.
+For they are the realities. I want to go now to some quiet corner
+where I can polish what I have learnt, sort out my accumulations, be
+undisturbed by these transitory symptomatic things....
+
+“What was that boy saying? They are burning the STAR office.... Well,
+let them....”
+
+And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things
+that hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the
+sky and the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights down
+side streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the making of
+greatness and a new great spirit in men. All the rest of his life, he
+said, must be given to that. He would say his thing plainly and honestly
+and afterwards other men would say it clearly and beautifully; here it
+would touch a man and there it would touch a man; the Invisible King in
+us all would find himself and know himself a little in this and a little
+in that, and at last a day would come, when fair things and fine things
+would rule the world and such squalor as this about them would be as
+impossible any more for men as a Stone Age Corroboree....
+
+Late or soon?
+
+Benham sought for some loose large measure of time.
+
+“Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes....
+
+“Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred years
+or ten thousand years? It will never come in our lives, White. Not soon
+enough for that. But after that everything will be soon--when one comes
+to death then everything is at one's fingertips--I can feel that greater
+world I shall never see as one feels the dawn coming through the last
+darkness....”
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at lunch
+in the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the burning
+of the STAR office. The Sherborough dining-room was on the first floor,
+and the Venetian window beside their table opened on to a verandah
+above a piazza. As they talked they became aware of an excitement in the
+street below, shouting and running and then a sound of wheels and the
+tramp of a body of soldiers marching quickly. White stood up and looked.
+“They're seizing the stuff in the gunshops,” he said, sitting down
+again. “It's amazing they haven't done it before.”
+
+They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at
+Mukden that had won Benham's admiration....
+
+A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass
+smashing. Then more revolver shots. “That's at the big club at the
+corner, I think,” said Benham and went out upon the verandah.
+
+Up and down the street mischief was afoot. Outside the Rand Club in
+the cross street a considerable mass of people had accumulated, and
+was being hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers. Down the street
+people were looking in the direction of the market-place and then
+suddenly a rush of figures flooded round the corner, first a froth
+of scattered individuals and then a mass, a column, marching with an
+appearance of order and waving a flag. It was a poorly disciplined body,
+it fringed out into a swarm of sympathizers and spectators upon the
+side walk, and at the head of it two men disputed. They seemed to be
+differing about the direction of the whole crowd. Suddenly one smote the
+other with his fist, a blow that hurled him sideways, and then turned
+with a triumphant gesture to the following ranks, waving his arms in
+the air. He was a tall lean man, hatless and collarless, greyhaired and
+wild-eyed. On he came, gesticulating gauntly, past the hotel.
+
+And then up the street something happened. Benham's attention was turned
+round to it by a checking, by a kind of catch in the breath, on the part
+of the advancing procession under the verandah.
+
+The roadway beyond the club had suddenly become clear. Across it a dozen
+soldiers had appeared and dismounted methodically and lined out, with
+their carbines in readiness. The mounted men at the club corner had
+vanished, and the people there had swayed about towards this new
+threat. Quite abruptly the miscellaneous noises of the crowd ceased.
+Understanding seized upon every one.
+
+These soldiers were going to fire....
+
+The brown uniformed figures moved like automata; the rifle shots rang
+out almost in one report....
+
+There was a rush in the crowd towards doorways and side streets, an
+enquiring pause, the darting back of a number of individuals into the
+roadway and then a derisive shouting. Nobody had been hit. The soldiers
+had fired in the air.
+
+“But this is a stupid game,” said Benham. “Why did they fire at all?”
+
+The tall man who had led the mob had run out into the middle of the
+road. His commando was a little disposed to assume a marginal position,
+and it had to be reassured. He was near enough for Benham to see his
+face. For a time it looked anxious and thoughtful. Then he seemed to
+jump to his decision. He unbuttoned and opened his coat wide as if
+defying the soldiers. “Shoot,” he bawled, “Shoot, if you dare!”
+
+A little uniform movement of the soldiers answered him. The small figure
+of the officer away there was inaudible. The coat of the man below
+flapped like the wings of a crowing cock before a breast of dirty shirt,
+the hoarse voice cracked with excitement, “Shoot, if you dare. Shoot, if
+you dare! See!”
+
+Came the metallic bang of the carbines again, and in the instant the
+leader collapsed in the road, a sprawl of clothes, hit by half a dozen
+bullets. It was an extraordinary effect. As though the figure had been
+deflated. It was incredible that a moment before this thing had been a
+man, an individual, a hesitating complicated purpose.
+
+“Good God!” cried Benham, “but--this is horrible!”
+
+The heap of garments lay still. The red hand that stretched out towards
+the soldiers never twitched.
+
+The spectacular silence broke into a confusion of sounds, women
+shrieked, men cursed, some fled, some sought a corner from which they
+might still see, others pressed forward. “Go for the swine!” bawled a
+voice, a third volley rattled over the heads of the people, and in
+the road below a man with a rifle halted, took aim, and answered the
+soldiers' fire. “Look out!” cried White who was watching the soldiers,
+and ducked. “This isn't in the air!”
+
+Came a straggling volley again, like a man running a metal hammer very
+rapidly along iron corrugations, and this time people were dropping all
+over the road. One white-faced man not a score of yards away fell with
+a curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for some yards with blood
+running abundantly from his neck, and fell and never stirred again.
+Another went down upon his back clumsily in the roadway and lay wringing
+his hands faster and faster until suddenly with a movement like a sigh
+they dropped inert by his side. A straw-hatted youth in a flannel suit
+ran and stopped and ran again. He seemed to be holding something red and
+strange to his face with both hands; above them his eyes were round
+and anxious. Blood came out between his fingers. He went right past
+the hotel and stumbled and suddenly sprawled headlong at the opposite
+corner. The majority of the crowd had already vanished into doorways and
+side streets. But there was still shouting and there was still a remnant
+of amazed and angry men in the roadway--and one or two angry women. They
+were not fighting. Indeed they were unarmed, but if they had had weapons
+now they would certainly have used them.
+
+“But this is preposterous!” cried Benham. “Preposterous. Those soldiers
+are never going to shoot again! This must stop.”
+
+He stood hesitating for a moment and then turned about and dashed for
+the staircase. “Good Heaven!” cried White. “What are you going to do?”
+
+Benham was going to stop that conflict very much as a man might go to
+stop a clock that is striking unwarrantably and amazingly. He was going
+to stop it because it annoyed his sense of human dignity.
+
+White hesitated for a moment and then followed, crying “Benham!”
+
+But there was no arresting this last outbreak of Benham's all too
+impatient kingship. He pushed aside a ducking German waiter who was
+peeping through the glass doors, and rushed out of the hotel. With
+a gesture of authority he ran forward into the middle of the street,
+holding up his hand, in which he still held his dinner napkin clenched
+like a bomb. White believes firmly that Benham thought he would be able
+to dominate everything. He shouted out something about “Foolery!”
+
+Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sublime indifference to
+current things....
+
+But the carbines spoke again.
+
+Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against something invisible. He
+spun right round and fell down into a sitting position. He sat looking
+surprised.
+
+After one moment of blank funk White drew out his pocket handkerchief,
+held it arm high by way of a white flag, and ran out from the piazza of
+the hotel.
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+“Are you hit?” cried White dropping to his knees and making himself as
+compact as possible. “Benham!”
+
+Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought answered in a strange voice,
+a whisper into which a whistling note had been mixed.
+
+“It was stupid of me to come out here. Not my quarrel. Faults on both
+sides. And now I can't get up. I will sit here a moment and pull myself
+together. Perhaps I'm--I must be shot. But it seemed to come--inside
+me.... If I should be hurt. Am I hurt?... Will you see to that book of
+mine, White? It's odd. A kind of faintness.... What?”
+
+“I will see after your book,” said White and glanced at his hand because
+it felt wet, and was astonished to discover it bright red. He forgot
+about himself then, and the fresh flight of bullets down the street.
+
+The immediate effect of this blood was that he said something more about
+the book, a promise, a definite promise. He could never recall his
+exact words, but their intention was binding. He conveyed his absolute
+acquiescence with Benham's wishes whatever they were. His life for that
+moment was unreservedly at his friend's disposal....
+
+White never knew if his promise was heard. Benham had stopped speaking
+quite abruptly with that “What?”
+
+He stared in front of him with a doubtful expression, like a man who is
+going to be sick, and then, in an instant, every muscle seemed to give
+way, he shuddered, his head flopped, and White held a dead man in his
+arms.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1138 ***
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+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
+    </title>
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+
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+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
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+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
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+  </head>
+  <body>
+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1138 ***</div>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by H. G. Wells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      1915
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT</b> </a>
+          </p>
+          <br />
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>THE PRELUDE</b> </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY </a>
+          </p>
+          <br />
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> <b>THE STORY</b> </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE BOY GROWS UP </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT
+            TOWN </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ AMANDA </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE SPIRITED
+            HONEYMOON </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER THE FIFTH ~~ THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY
+            </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ THE NEW HAROUN AL
+            RASCHID </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE PRELUDE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;the aristocratic life.&rdquo;
+       But by &ldquo;aristocratic&rdquo; 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&mdash;it is a
+      thing easier to understand than to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One might hesitate to call this idea &ldquo;innate,&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;No, do not bandage my
+      eyes&rdquo;&mdash;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. &ldquo;Porphyry,&rdquo; his mother had discovered before he was seventeen, &ldquo;is an
+      excellent boy, a brilliant boy, but, I begin to see, just a little
+      unbalanced.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the story of him, is that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most of us are&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;practicable things. For Benham,
+      exceptionally, there were not these practicable things. He blundered, he
+      fell short of himself, he had&mdash;as you will be told&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when he discovered&mdash;and in this he was assisted not a little by
+      his friend at his elbow&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;one hesitates to call it a book&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;BUT WHY THE DEVIL
+      AREN'T WE?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then life&mdash;life would be the wonder it so perplexingly just
+      isn't....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;But this will never make a book,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a confession,
+      not a diary. It was&mdash;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 &ldquo;aristocratic&rdquo; 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&mdash;at the end only its ideals of fearlessness and
+      generosity remained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;Bushido&rdquo; written with a particularly flourishing capital letter and twice
+      repeated. &ldquo;That was inevitable,&rdquo; said White with the comforting regret one
+      feels for a friend's banalities. &ldquo;And it dates... [unreadable] this was
+      early....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Modern aristocracy, the new aristocracy,&rdquo; he read presently, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story began with the schoolfellow he had known at Minchinghampton
+      School.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The combination of apparently stout heart and manifestly weak stomach had
+      exercised the Minchinghampton intelligence profoundly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;hath said in his heart there is no God.&rdquo;
+       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 &ldquo;soundly flogged&rdquo; by his head master. &ldquo;Years afterwards that boy came
+      back to thank &mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gurr,&rdquo; said Prothero softly. &ldquo;STEW&mdash;ard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your turn next, Benham,&rdquo; whispered an orthodox controversialist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Lord! I'd like to see him,&rdquo; said Benham with a forced loudness that
+      could scarcely be ignored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The subsequent controversy led to an interview with the head. From it
+      Benham emerged more whitely strung up than ever. &ldquo;He said he would
+      certainly swish me if I deserved it, and I said I would certainly kill him
+      if he did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;not
+      one.... And because I choose to say what I think!... I'd run amuck.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Fear&mdash;the
+      First Limitation,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;NOW say you don't believe in God?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And anyhow,&rdquo; said Benham, when it was clear that he was not to be struck
+      dead forthwith, &ldquo;you show a poor idea of your God to think he'd kill a
+      schoolboy for honest doubt. Even old Roddles&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't listen to you,&rdquo; cried Latham the humourist, &ldquo;I can't listen to
+      you. It's&mdash;HORRIBLE.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, who began it?&rdquo; asked Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Oh
+      WOW!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Latham's voice came out of the darkness. &ldquo;This ATHEISM that you and Billy
+      Prothero have brought into the school&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He started violently at another vivid flash, and every one remained
+      silent, waiting for the thunder....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fear, the First Limitation&rdquo;&mdash;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. &ldquo;Fear,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;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&mdash;futility.
+      The beginning of all aristocracy is the subjugation of fear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At first the struggle was so great that he hated fear without any
+      qualification; he wanted to abolish it altogether.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I was a boy,&rdquo; he writes, &ldquo;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&mdash;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;adequacy of enterprise,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;his bull adventure
+      rather increased than diminished that disposition&mdash;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. &ldquo;My small mind was
+      overwhelmed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had never thought,&rdquo; White read, &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and looked
+      over my head with yellow eyes&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember that he took me in his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'It's only a big sort of pussy, Poff,' he said. 'FELIS TIGRIS. FELIS, you
+      know, means cat.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I knew better. I was in no mood then for my father's insatiable
+      pedagoguery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'And my little son mustn't be a coward.'...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;.
+      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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the poor old wretch was
+      still able to make a bleating sound at that&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the only hotel it was in those
+      days&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not bring himself to do that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The peasant surveyed him from the further side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be afraid!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn!&rdquo; whispered Benham, but he took the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Afterwards, rather ignobly, he tried to explain in his public-school
+      French. &ldquo;Pas de peur,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Pas de peur. Mais la tete, n'a pas
+      l'habitude.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The peasant, failing to understand, assured him again that there was no
+      danger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (&ldquo;Damn!&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said Benham to himself, &ldquo;if I do not go back along the planks my
+      secret honour is gone for ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;what can we call it?&mdash;the taming of fear, the nature,
+      care, and management of fear....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;and going on dropping. We were
+      both strapped, and I got my feet against the side and clung to the locked
+      second wheel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the point I want to insist upon is that I did not feel afraid. I was
+      simply enormously, terribly INTERESTED....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I remember a jerk and a feeling that I was flying up again. I was
+      astonished by a tremendous popping&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There again the chief feeling was a sense of oddity. I wasn't sorry for
+      him any more than I was for myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seemed to me that it was all right with us both, remarkable, vivid,
+      but all right....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure that was so....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;life beyond fear&rdquo;; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These things,&rdquo; Benham had written, &ldquo;are much more horrible when one
+      considers them from the point of view of an easy-chair&rdquo;;&mdash;White gave
+      an assenting nod&mdash;&ldquo;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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mm,&rdquo; said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his brows and
+      shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;still reminiscent of the maternal lair.&rdquo; But fear has very
+      little hold upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme
+      readiness to resentment and rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like most inexperienced people,&rdquo; ran his notes, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, &ldquo;This brings
+      me to God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil it does!&rdquo; said White, roused to a keener attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Surely the man was not a Christian!)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to sleep. He
+      felt full of life and anxious for happenings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Surely it had been silent during the day.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead grass and the leaves.
+      In the day the air had been still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a nightjar!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;HUNT, HUNT&rdquo;; that might be a deer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite close at
+      hand. A monkey?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were
+      bats....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;low, monotonous&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life than he
+      was now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand and so
+      inaccessible....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the jungle before him. Was it after all so inaccessible?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; the road said to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the moonlight and stood
+      motionless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was he afraid?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;staring unblinkingly as cats stare at a fire&mdash;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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was he afraid?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That question determined him to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, this was very wonderful and beautiful, and there must always be
+      jungles for men to walk in. Always there must be jungles....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A thorn caught at him and he disentangled himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Curiosity made Benham draw nearer, very softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The uproar of the bears died away at last, almost abruptly, and left the
+      jungle to the incessant night-jars....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For what end was this life of the jungle?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Man must keep hard, man must also keep fierce. Will the jungle keep him
+      fierce?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For life, thought Benham, there must be insecurity....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had missed the track....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;.
+      It was the croaking of frogs. Ahead was a solitary gleam. He was
+      approaching a jungle pool....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly the stillness was alive, in a panic uproar. &ldquo;HONK!&rdquo; cried a great
+      voice, and &ldquo;HONK!&rdquo; There was a clatter of hoofs, a wild rush&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke hoarsely. &ldquo;I am Man,&rdquo; he said, and lifted a hand as he spoke.
+      &ldquo;The Thought of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man,&rdquo; he said, in a voice that had no sound, and took a step forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wough!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked on towards the deserted tank and now he was talking aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand the jungle. I understand.... If a few men die here, what
+      matter? There are worse deaths than being killed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is this fool's trap of security?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every time in my life that I have fled from security I have fled from
+      death....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You sleeping away there in the cities! Do you know what it means for you
+      that I am here to-night?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what it means to you?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am just one&mdash;just the precursor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Presently, if you will not budge, those hot cities must be burnt about
+      you. You must come out of them....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat very still indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He must have slept soundly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He heard a cock crow, and another answer&mdash;jungle fowl these must be,
+      because there could be no village within earshot&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;but that
+      was nonsense, it was the crest of a steep hillside covered with woods of
+      teak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up and stretched himself, and wondered whether he had dreamed of
+      a tiger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to remember and retrace the course of his over-night wanderings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and then
+      far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly and
+      thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been no dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE STORY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE BOY GROWS UP
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;ship-shape,&rdquo; 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&mdash;with its
+      method of manual training for example&mdash;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. &ldquo;After my visits to her,&rdquo; wrote Benham, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have read my father's articles upon this subject,&rdquo; wrote Benham, &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His heart failed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Once or twice, too, he seemed to be reaching out at me from the school
+      pulpit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;the one living
+      purpose&rdquo; of his life, to be off to Minchinghampton and the next step in
+      the mysterious ascent of the English educational system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; said the father over his study pipe and with his glasses fixed on
+      remote distances above the head of the current sympathizer, &ldquo;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,&mdash;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&mdash;God knows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did his very best to make it a wrench.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;WELL, little man, my
+      son,&rdquo; she would cry in her happy singing voice, &ldquo;WELL?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;What have
+      you been doing?&rdquo; she asked, &ldquo;since I saw you last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The horse bolted&mdash;and you stuck on? Did you squeak? I stick on, but
+      I HAVE to squeak. But you&mdash;of course, No! you mustn't. I'm just a
+      little woman. And I ride big horses....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And for the end she had invented a characteristic little ceremony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She would stand up in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders and
+      look into his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clean eyes?&rdquo; she would say, &ldquo;&mdash;still?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;GO,&rdquo; she would say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
+      fairyland to this grey world again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;feelings.&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;whatever
+      she meant by that&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;or a tremendously popular poet. As a rule she saw
+      him unmarried&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me all that you are doing NOW,&rdquo; she said to him one afternoon when
+      she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington Manor.
+      &ldquo;How do you like Cambridge? Are you making friends? Have you joined that
+      thing&mdash;the Union, is it?&mdash;and delivered your maiden speech? If
+      you're for politics, Poff, that's your game. Have you begun it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must make good friends,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew one of the Baptons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff,&rdquo; she said suddenly, &ldquo;has it ever occurred to you what you are going
+      to do afterwards. Do you know you are going to be quite well off?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. &ldquo;My father said something. He
+      was rather vague. It wasn't his affair&mdash;that kind of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will be quite well off,&rdquo; she repeated, without any complicating
+      particulars. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;HOW well off?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have several thousands a year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thousands?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;Mother, this is rather astounding.... Does this mean there are
+      estates somewhere, responsibilities?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is just money. Investments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, I've imagined&mdash;. I've thought always I should have to DO
+      something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was he in the right set? Was he indeed in the right college? Trinity, by
+      his account, seemed a huge featureless place&mdash;and might he not
+      conceivably be LOST in it? In those big crowds one had to insist upon
+      oneself. Poff never insisted upon himself&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who IS this Billy Prothero?&rdquo; she asked one evening in the walled
+      garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was at Minchinghampton.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who IS he? Who is his father? Where does he come from?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sought in his mind for a space. &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;And does he call himself
+      a Socialist?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;I THOUGHT he would.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff,&rdquo; she cried suddenly, &ldquo;you're not a SOCIALIST?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Such a vague term.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But these friends of yours&mdash;they seem to be ALL Socialists. Red ties
+      and everything complete.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have ideas,&rdquo; he evaded. He tried to express it better. &ldquo;They give
+      one something to take hold of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat up stiffly on the garden-seat. She lifted her finger at him, very
+      seriously. &ldquo;I hope,&rdquo; she said with all her heart, &ldquo;that you will have
+      nothing to do with such ideas. Nothing. SOCIALISM!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They make a case.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pooh! Any one can make a case.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;absolutely&mdash;RUBBISH....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and it had
+      always turned out remarkably well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish sometimes,&rdquo; his mother said abruptly, with an unusually sharp note
+      in her voice, &ldquo;that you wouldn't look quite so like your father.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm NOT like my father!&rdquo; said Benham puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer reason,
+      &ldquo;so why should you go LOOKING like him? That CONCERNED expression....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She jumped to her feet. &ldquo;Poff,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;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&mdash;as God meant them to do. What stupid
+      things we human beings are!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most baffling of all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;inseparables.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn't going to be bullied by a beast,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose it had been an elephant?&rdquo; Prothero cried.... &ldquo;A mad elephant?...
+      A pack of wolves?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was too honest not to see that he was entangled. &ldquo;Well, suppose in
+      YOUR case it had been a wild cat?... A fierce mastiff?... A mastiff?... A
+      terrier?... A lap dog?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but my case is that there are limits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was impatient at the idea of limits. With a faintly malicious
+      pleasure Prothero lugged him back to that idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We both admit there are limits,&rdquo; Prothero concluded. &ldquo;But between the
+      absolutely impossible and the altogether possible there's the region of
+      risk. You think a man ought to take that risk&mdash;&rdquo; He reflected. &ldquo;I
+      think&mdash;no&mdash;I think NOT.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he feels afraid,&rdquo; cried Benham, seeing his one point. &ldquo;If he feels
+      afraid. Then he ought to take it....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a digestive interval, Prothero asked, &ldquo;WHY? Why should he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?&mdash;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. &ldquo;You can't build your honour on fudge,
+      Benham. Like committing sacrilege&mdash;in order to buy a cloth for the
+      altar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By that Benham was slipped from the recognized code and launched upon
+      speculations which became the magnificent research.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because Benham made it perfectly clear what he had thought and felt about
+      this hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Of course,&mdash;ah, yes, I know him, I know him. Yes, I did him a
+      little service&mdash;in '96.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And something in his manner would suggest a satisfaction, or a
+      dissatisfaction with confidential mysteries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shoot, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You hunt, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know Scotland well, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ride much, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never been across a horse in my life, Lady Marayne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut, tut,&rdquo; said Sir Godfrey. &ldquo;Why!&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've never had a chance of riding. And I think I'm afraid of horses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's only an excuse,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne. &ldquo;Everybody's afraid of horses
+      and nobody's really afraid of horses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm not used to horses. You see&mdash;I live on my mother. And she
+      can't afford to keep a stable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His hostess did not see his expression of discomfort. Her pretty eyes were
+      intent upon the peas with which she was being served.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does your mother live in the country?&rdquo; she asked, and took her peas with
+      fastidious exactness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero coloured brightly. &ldquo;She lives in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But isn't it dreadfully hot in town in the summer?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero had an uncomfortable sense of being very red in the face. This
+      kept him red. &ldquo;We're suburban people,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I thought&mdash;isn't there the seaside?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother has a business,&rdquo; said Prothero, redder than ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O-oh!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne. &ldquo;What fun that must be for her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a real business, and she has to live by it. Sometimes it's a worry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But a business of her own!&rdquo; She surveyed the confusion of his visage with
+      a sweet intelligence. &ldquo;Is it an amusing sort of business, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero looked mulish. &ldquo;My mother is a dressmaker,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;In Brixton.
+      She doesn't do particularly badly&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Marayne felt she had unmasked Prothero almost indecently. Whatever
+      happened there must be no pause. There must be no sign of a hitch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it's good at tennis,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You DO play tennis, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I gesticulate,&rdquo; said Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Marayne, still in flight from that pause, went off at a tangent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff, my dear,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I've had a diving-board put at the deep end of
+      the pond.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The remark hung unanswered for a moment. The transition had been too quick
+      for Benham's state of mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you swim, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prothero mopped up the lot of us at Minchinghampton with his diving and
+      swimming,&rdquo; Benham explained, and the tension was relaxed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;&ldquo;And it didn't wear a
+      hedge or anything,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne. &ldquo;That was what they didn't quite
+      like. Swimming in an undraped pond....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But people ought not to go about having dressmakers for mothers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And coming into other people's houses and influencing their sons....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night when everything was over Billy sat at the writing-table of his
+      sumptuous bedroom&mdash;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,&mdash;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 &ldquo;Sir&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Billy puffed out his cheeks to blow a sigh, and then decided to be angry
+      and say &ldquo;Damn!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prothero,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you know what my father is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought he ran a preparatory school.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the profoundest resentment in Prothero's voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, all the same, I'm going to be a rich man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand,&rdquo; said Prothero, without any shadow of congratulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would you do, Prothero, if you found yourself saddled with some
+      thousands a year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Godfathers don't grow in Brixton,&rdquo; said Prothero concisely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what am I to do, Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does all THIS belong to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, this is my mother's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Godfather too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've not thought.... I suppose so. Or her own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero meditated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THIS life,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;this large expensiveness&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He left his criticism unfinished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I agree. It suits my mother somehow. I can't understand her living in any
+      other way. But&mdash;for me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can one do with several thousands a year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero's interest in this question presently swamped his petty personal
+      resentments. &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. SOME.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero's interest was growing as he faced the possibilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've dreamt of a paper,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a paper that should tell the brute
+      truth about things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that I'm particularly built to be a journalist,&rdquo; Benham
+      objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're not,&rdquo; said Billy.... &ldquo;You might go into Parliament as a perfectly
+      independent member.... Only you wouldn't get in....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not a speaker,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Billy, &ldquo;if you don't decide on a game, you'll just go on
+      like this. You'll fall into a groove, you'll&mdash;you'll hunt. You'll go
+      to Scotland for the grouse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the moment Prothero had no further suggestions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham waited for a second or so before he broached his own idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Benham, that's the thin end of aristocracy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's one's own look-out,&rdquo; said Benham, after reflection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it's bound to happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham retreated a little from the immediate question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero frowned over this, and then he made a sweeping proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;YOU CANNOT HAVE ARISTOCRACY,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;BECAUSE, YOU SEE&mdash;ALL MEN
+      ARE RIDICULOUS. Democracy has to fight its way out from under plutocracy.
+      There is nothing else to be done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But a man in my position&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a ridiculous position. You may try to escape being ridiculous. You
+      won't succeed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned at the open window, held out a long forefinger, and uttered his
+      countervailing faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero reflected. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better, pride than dishonour,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;better the pretentious life
+      than the sordid life. What else is there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A life isn't necessarily sordid because it isn't pretentious,&rdquo; said
+      Prothero, his voice betraying a defensive disposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But a life with a large income MUST be sordid unless it makes some sort
+      of attempt to be fine....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Wait till I have a mount for him.&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This struck Prothero as an inadequate statement of the Socialist project
+      and he made an unsuccessful attempt to get it amended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Billy perceived no way of explaining away this version of his Socialism
+      that would not involve uncivil contradictions&mdash;and nobody ever
+      contradicted Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Lady Marayne, don't you think there is a lot of disorder and
+      injustice in the world?&rdquo; he protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There would be ever so much more if your Socialists had their way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But still, don't you think&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;To deny aristocracy is to deny
+      the existence of the fittest. It is on the existence of the fittest that
+      progress depends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do our social conditions exalt the fittest?&rdquo; asked Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is another question,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Sir Godfrey. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as I can understand Mr. Prothero,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne, &ldquo;he thinks
+      that all the inferiors are the superiors and all the superiors inferior.
+      It's quite simple....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last came the hour of tipping. An embarrassed and miserable Prothero
+      went slinking about the house distributing unexpected gold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was stupid, it was damnable; he had had to borrow the money from his
+      mother....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;He has ideas!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What are ideas? England may yet be ruined by ideas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One glowing afternoon in October, as these two young men came over
+      Magdalen Bridge after a long disputatious and rather tiring walk to
+      Drayton&mdash;they had been talking of Eugenics and the &ldquo;family&rdquo;&mdash;Benham
+      was almost knocked down by an American trotter driven by Lord Breeze.
+      &ldquo;Whup there!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Breeze grinned the sort of grin a man remembers. And passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damnation!&rdquo; said Benham with a face that had become suddenly very white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then presently. &ldquo;Any fool can do that who cares to go to the trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Prothero, taking up their unquenchable issue, &ldquo;that is the
+      feeling of democracy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I walk because I choose to,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing rankled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This equestrianism,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;is a matter of time and money&mdash;time
+      even more than money. I want to read. I want to deal with ideas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any fool can drive....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero made a noise of sympathetic assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a country where equestrianism is assertion I suppose one must be
+      equestrian....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prothero,&rdquo; he said in hall next day, &ldquo;we are going to drive to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Benham,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;have you ever driven before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;NEVER,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Why are you doing this?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Benham, is it&mdash;EQUESTRIAN?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham made no audible reply. They proceeded resolutely in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is mine,&rdquo; said Benham compactly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is yours, sir,&rdquo; said an ostler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He looks&mdash;QUIET.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll find him fresh enough, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham made a complicated ascent to the driver's seat and was handed the
+      reins. &ldquo;Come on,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Check,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Sorry,&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;this isn't a trotter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn't get a trotter,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I would try this sort of thing before I tried a trotter,&rdquo; he
+      added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then suddenly came disaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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. &ldquo;God!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whoa!&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;Whoa!&rdquo; but also, unfortunately, he sawed hard at
+      the horse's mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry,&rdquo; he was saying. &ldquo;Somebody ought to have been in charge of the
+      barrow. Here are my cards. I am ready to pay for any damage....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The barrow ought not to have been there....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I am going on. Of course I'm going on. Thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Check!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he got to the fork between the Huntingdon Road and the Cottenham
+      Road, both roads were clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Going pretty fast 'e was,&rdquo; said the road-mender, &ldquo;and whipping 'is
+      'orse. Else you might 'a thought 'e was a boltin' with 'im.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You all right, Benham?&rdquo; cried Prothero, advancing into the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whoa!&rdquo; said Benham, and the horse stopped. &ldquo;Are you coming up, Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero clambered up beside him. &ldquo;I was anxious,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was no need to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've broken your whip.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. It broke.... GET up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They proceeded on their way to Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something has happened to the wheel,&rdquo; said Prothero, trying to be at his
+      ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Merely a splinter or so. And a spoke perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what is this behind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham made a half-turn of the head. &ldquo;It's a motor-bicycle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero took in details.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some of it is missing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, the front wheel is under the seat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you find it?&rdquo; Prothero asked, after an interval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He ran into a motor-car&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero glanced at the splinters in the wheel with a renewed interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did your wheel get into it?&rdquo; he asked. Benham affected not to hear. He
+      was evidently in no mood for story-telling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you get down, Prothero?&rdquo; he asked abruptly, with the note of
+      suppressed anger thickening his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero became vividly red. &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; he said, after an interval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I DO,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For three days the two friends avoided each other, and then Prothero went
+      to Benham's room. Benham was smoking cigarettes&mdash;Lady Marayne, in the
+      first warmth of his filial devotion, had prohibited his pipe&mdash;and
+      reading Webb's INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY. &ldquo;Hello!&rdquo; he said coldly, scarcely
+      looking up, and continued to read that absorbing work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I keep on thinking how I jumped down from that damned dog-cart,&rdquo; said
+      Prothero, without any preface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It didn't matter in the least,&rdquo; said Benham distantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! ROT,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;I behaved like a coward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham shut his book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Benham,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;You are right about aristocracy, and I am wrong.
+      I've been thinking about it night and day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham betrayed no emotion. But his tone changed. &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there
+      are cigarettes and whiskey in the corner. Don't make a fuss about a
+      trifle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No whiskey,&rdquo; said Billy, and lit a cigarette. &ldquo;And it isn't a trifle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to Benham's hearthrug. &ldquo;That business,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;has changed all
+      my views. No&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham said nothing, but he put down Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and reached
+      out for and got and lit a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;that you don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Funk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;aloud. I had an inkling
+      of it&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy, don't be an old ass,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both young men paused for a moment. They made no demonstrations. But the
+      strain was at an end between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've thought it all out,&rdquo; Billy went on with a sudden buoyancy. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The habit of pride.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. And then&mdash;then we are lords of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this, Billy,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;I steadfastly believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've seen it all now,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;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&mdash;even as
+      these dons we see about us&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;I wish
+      I could do so too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;this afternoon. But it
+      won't last. YOU&mdash;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&mdash;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;you've the boldest mind that ever I met.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero's face lit with satisfaction. Then his countenance fell again. &ldquo;I
+      know I'm better there,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stuck one leg over the arm of his chair. &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;come
+      and be&mdash;equestrian and stop this nonsense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn it&mdash;you DIVE!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd go in before me if a woman was drowning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can,&rdquo; said Billy, &ldquo;you can. But not I! Heavens, the TROUBLE of it!
+      The riding-school! The getting up early! No!&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not so great.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so great! I don't mean the essential expense. But&mdash;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&mdash;. Benham! how much
+      did your little expedition the other day&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short and regarded his friend with round eyes and raised
+      eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A reluctant grin overspread Benham's face. He was beginning to see the
+      humour of the affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Billy regarded his toes and cleared his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Depending as I do on a widowed mother in Brixton for all the expenditure
+      that isn't covered by my pot-hunting&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;it wasn't a fair sample afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's footer,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;we might both play footer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or boxing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, anyhow, you must come with me when I drive again. I'm going to start
+      a trotter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I miss another drive may I be&mdash;lost for ever,&rdquo; said Billy, with
+      the utmost sincerity. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall enjoy it very much,&rdquo; said Prothero in a small voice after an
+      interval for reflection. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did so and Benham strolled to the window and stood looking out upon the
+      great court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might do something this afternoon,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Splendid idea,&rdquo; reflected Billy over his whiskey. &ldquo;Living hard and
+      thinking hard. A sort of Intelligentsia that is BLOODED.... I shall, of
+      course, come as far as I can with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      13
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Go slowly, speak to the man at the back.&rdquo;
+       It brought up memories of his own experiences, of rows of gaslit faces,
+      and of a friendly helpful voice that said, &ldquo;Speak up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;White's
+      world was the literary world, and that is how it looked to him&mdash;which
+      profess to set out the lives of men, this part of the journey, this
+      crucial passage among the Sphinxes, is still done&mdash;when it is done at
+      all&mdash;slightly, evasively. Why?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White fell back on his professionalism. &ldquo;It does not make a book. It makes
+      a novel into a treatise, it turns it into a dissertation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White returned from an unprofitable digression to the matter before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      14
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must admit some men are taller than others?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then the others are broader.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some are smaller altogether.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nimbler&mdash;it's notorious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some of the smaller are less nimble than the others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then they have better nightmares. How can you tell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and the talk went on over his
+      prostrate attempts to rally and protest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping and great violence, and a
+      volley of obscure French colloquialisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was understood to convey that the speaker was a Jew, and did not in the
+      least mean what he was saying....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      15
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had called it ARISTOCRACY. But he was far away by now from
+      political aristocracy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We see life,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't any choice of Hercules I mean, any mere alternative whether we
+      will be, how shall I put it?&mdash;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&mdash;that's the old and perpetual choice, that
+      has always been&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or&mdash;we are lost....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (&ldquo;Swill of this brimming world,&rdquo; said White. &ldquo;Some of this sounds
+      uncommonly like Prothero.&rdquo; He mused for a moment and then resumed his
+      reading.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (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.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Tobias&rdquo;
+       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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have all been Tobias in our time,&rdquo; said White.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This man Merkle seemed quite unaware that humanity &ldquo;here and now&rdquo;&mdash;even
+      as he was engaged in meticulously putting out Benham's clothes&mdash;was
+      &ldquo;leaving its ancestral shelters and going out upon the greatest adventure
+      that ever was in space or time.&rdquo; If he had been told as much by Benham he
+      would probably have said, &ldquo;Indeed, sir,&rdquo; and proceeded accurately with his
+      duties. And if Benham's voice had seemed to call for any additional
+      remark, he would probably have added, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;He never would help me with
+      any of this business,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+      &ldquo;the world at his feet.&rdquo; 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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Why particularly am I picked out for so tremendous
+      an advantage?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;PECUNIA NON OLET,&rdquo; Benham wrote, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his thoughts had gone wider and deeper than that....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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&mdash;No!&mdash;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&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero always pleased Benham when he swept away empires. There was
+      always a point when the rhetoric broke into gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've got to sweep them away, Benham,&rdquo; he said, with a wide gesture of
+      his arm. &ldquo;We've got to sweep them all away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The only sane political work for an intelligent man is to get the
+      world-state ready. For that we have to prepare an aristocracy&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your world-state will be aristocratic?&rdquo; some one interpolated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he added, pipe in mouth, as he poured out his whiskey, &ldquo;it's
+      a big undertaking. It's an affair of centuries....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, as a further afterthought: &ldquo;All the more reason for getting to
+      work at it....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In his moods of inspiration Prothero would discourse through the tobacco
+      smoke until that great world-state seemed imminent&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;and
+      neglecting the Frenchman, the Russian, the German, the American, the
+      Indian, the Chinaman, and, indeed, the greater part of mankind from the
+      problem&mdash;might become the other....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;for all that he was capable of doing. All this had awaited
+      him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!&mdash;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!&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Galvanized
+      Corpse.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;If I were
+      you,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;provided it was not
+      from the party point of view a vexatious or impossible line&mdash;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&mdash;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, &ldquo;a perfect fount....&rdquo; Two other people, independently of each other,
+      pointed out to Benham the helpfulness of a few articles in the half-crown
+      monthlies....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are the assumptions underlying all this?&rdquo; Benham asked himself in a
+      phase of lucidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after reflection. &ldquo;Good God! The assumptions! What do they think will
+      satisfy me?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Get right out of all this while you are young,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He gave the diplomatic service as a second choice. &ldquo;There you
+      are,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;since Teddy has Europeanized 'em....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the Reverend Harold Benham took a subdued but thoughtful share in his
+      son's admonition. He came up to the flat&mdash;due precautions were taken
+      to prevent a painful encounter&mdash;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. &ldquo;There are few men,
+      Poff, who would not envy you your opportunities,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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&mdash;and
+      ambitious&mdash;I thought that some day I might belong to the
+      Athenaeum.... One has to learn....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;everybody did that&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so to this....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very wonderful and delicious, this first indulgence of sense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was shabby and underhand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Priapus....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was the most subtle, delightful and tender of created beings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had amazing streaks of vulgarity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And some astonishing friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once she had seemed to lead the talk deliberately to money matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She loved him and desired him. There was no doubt of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless his mind was as a whole pervaded by the feeling that he ought
+      not to have been taken by surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he had the clearest conviction in his mind that if now he could be put
+      back again to the day before that lunch....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No! he should not have gone there to lunch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had gone there to see her Clementi piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had he or had he not thought beforehand of any other possibility?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a point so vital his memory was curiously unsure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With some men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause and then his mother's voice came, flattened by
+      disappointment. &ldquo;Very well then, little Poff. Perhaps I shall see you
+      to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damned liar!&rdquo; he said, and then, &ldquo;Dirty liar!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he turned up New Bond Street he saw a figure that struck him as
+      familiar. Surely!&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It came into Benham's head for the first time that life could be tiresome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;THAT!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night, dear,&rdquo; a woman drifted by him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've SAID good night,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;I've SAID good night,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Oh, God!&rdquo; he said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then: &ldquo;Oh! The DIRTINESS of life! The dirty muddle of life!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are we doing with life? What are we all doing with life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't only this poor Milly business. This only brings it to a head. Of
+      course she wants money....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His thoughts came on again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the ugliness!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did I begin it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a long interval his mind moved again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      WHAT ARE WE UP TO WITH LIFE! WHAT ARE WE MAKING OF LIFE!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But hadn't he intended to make something tremendous of life? Hadn't he
+      come to London trailing a glory?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;God!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;How did I
+      get there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then suddenly he reached out his arms in the darkness and prayed aloud
+      to the silences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, God! Give me back my visions! Give me back my visions!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was to be done?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place he must get away and think about it all, think himself
+      clear of all these&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wanted to get right away from London and everybody and lie in the quiet
+      darkness and stare up at the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Merkle came in to him in the morning he was fast asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The familiar curtain rings awakened Benham. He turned his head over,
+      stared for a moment and then remembered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Merkle,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am going for a walking tour. I am going off this
+      morning. Haven't I a rucksack?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You 'ave a sort of canvas bag, sir, with pockets to it,&rdquo; said Merkle.
+      &ldquo;Will you be needing the VERY 'eavy boots with 'obnails&mdash;Swiss, I
+      fancy, sir&mdash;or your ordinary shooting boots?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when may I expect you back, sir?&rdquo; asked Merkle as the moment for
+      departure drew near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;I don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then will there be any address for forwarding letters, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham hadn't thought of that. For a moment he regarded Merkle's
+      scrupulous respect with a transient perplexity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll let you know, Merkle,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'll let you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some days at least, notes, telephone messages, engagements, all this
+      fuss and clamour about nothing, should clamour for him in vain....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how closely,&rdquo; cried White, in a mood of cultivated enthusiasm; &ldquo;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&mdash;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was he to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They at any rate were not troubled with the problem of what to do with
+      their lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      13
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What work am I going to do? What work am I going to do?&rdquo; He repeated it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in this pellucid air things took their proper proportions again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now what was he to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Politics,&rdquo; he said aloud to the turf and the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;It's not
+      for me to judge them,&rdquo; he decided, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or else, why shouldn't I go down there and pick up a shovel and set to
+      work? To make leisure for my betters....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and
+      Mrs. Skelmersdale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how is one to be a political man when one is not in politics?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham frowned at the Weald. His ideas were running thin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted a second finger. How to learn? For it was learning that he had
+      to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then in a little while the party conflict would swallow him up?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The party game had not altogether swallowed &ldquo;Mr. Arthur.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But every one is not a Balfour....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Food?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      14
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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. (&ldquo;Not TOO sparingly,&rdquo; 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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      15
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better die with the Excelsior chap up the mountains,&rdquo; the defence
+      interjected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Than what?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider the quality Benham had already betrayed. He was manifestly
+      incapable of a decent modest mediocre existence. Already he had ceased to
+      be&mdash;if one may use so fine a word for genteel abstinence&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't smug about in a state of falsified righteousness like these
+      Crampton chaps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been sliding fast to it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;NO! I'M DAMNED IF I DO!...&rdquo; 16
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly dinner-time....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;simply. Why drag in the thought of emptiness
+      just at this point?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very early to go to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When one thinks of sleeping out under the stars one is apt to forget the
+      dew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;what was that? Soft and large and
+      quite near and noiseless. An owl!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat up and sneezed violently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something squealed in the bushes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;And a liqueur?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had some Benedictine!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One could not slight such sympathetic helpfulness. The Benedictine was
+      genuine. And then came the coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cup of coffee was generously conceived and honestly made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A night of clear melancholy ensued....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      17
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;he ought not to have gone there to lunch. After that he
+      began composing letters at a great rate. Delicate&mdash;explanatory. Was
+      it on the whole best to be explanatory?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was going to be a tremendous job, this breaking with her. And it had
+      begun so easily....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said grimly, &ldquo;it must end,&rdquo; and rolled over and stared at the
+      black....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;whether one has a
+      justification or whether one hasn't.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so on and so on and so on....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      18
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second day opened rather dully for Benham. There was not an idea left
+      in his head about anything in the world. It was&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Continence by preoccupation;&rdquo; he tried the phrase....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This set the key of his thought throughout the afternoon&mdash;until
+      Amanda happened to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ AMANDA
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda happened to Benham very suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham detested dog-fights. He stood up, pale and distressed. &ldquo;Lie down!&rdquo;
+       he cried. &ldquo;Shut up, you brutes!&rdquo; and was at a loss for further action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda seized the fallen stick and whacked the dog she held, reasonably
+      but effectively until its yelps satisfied her. &ldquo;There!&rdquo; she said pitching
+      her victim from her, and stood erect again. She surveyed the proceedings
+      of her helper for the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You needn't,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;choke Sultan anymore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ugh!&rdquo; she said, as though that was enough for Sultan. And peace was
+      restored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm obliged to you. But&mdash;... I say! He didn't bite you, did he? Oh,
+      SULTAN!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;SORRY! So Sultan by his code of eye and tail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I see?... Something ought to be done to this....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took his wrist in her hand, and her cheek and eyelashes came within a
+      foot of his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some observant element in his composition guessed, and guessed quite
+      accurately, that she was nineteen....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;&ldquo;she's always so RECKLESS with those dogs,&rdquo; 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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;&ldquo;In the spring sunshine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You live in London?&rdquo; said Mrs. Wilder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes. And he had wanted to think things out. In London one could do no
+      thinking&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here we do nothing else,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Except dog-fights,&rdquo; said the elder cousin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I would just wander and think and sleep in the open air. Have
+      you ever tried to sleep in the open air?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the summer we all do,&rdquo; said the younger cousin. &ldquo;Amanda makes us. We
+      go out on to the little lawn at the back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see Amanda has some friends at Limpsfield. And there they all go out
+      and camp and sleep in the woods.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; reflected Mrs. Wilder, &ldquo;in April it must be different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It IS different,&rdquo; said Benham with feeling; &ldquo;the night comes five hours
+      too soon. And it comes wet.&rdquo; He described his experiences and his flight
+      to Shere and the kindly landlord and the cup of coffee. &ldquo;And after that I
+      thought with a vengeance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you write things?&rdquo; asked Amanda abruptly, and it seemed to him with a
+      note of hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. No, it was just a private puzzle. It was something I couldn't get
+      straight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you have got it straight?&rdquo; asked Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were making up your mind about something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda DEAR!&rdquo; cried her mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I don't mind telling you,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I wanted to think about was what I should do with my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't you any WORK&mdash;?&rdquo; asked the elder cousin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None that I'm obliged to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's where a man has the advantage,&rdquo; said Amanda with the tone of
+      profound reflection. &ldquo;You can choose. And what are you going to do with
+      your life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; her mother protested, &ldquo;really you mustn't!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going round the world to think about it,&rdquo; Benham told her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd give my soul to travel,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She addressed her remark to the salad in front of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But have you no ties?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Wilder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None that hold me,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were you,&rdquo; said Amanda, and reflected. Then she half turned herself
+      to him. &ldquo;I should go first to India,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and I should shoot, one,
+      two, three, yes, three tigers. And then I would see Farukhabad Sikri&mdash;I
+      was reading in a book about it yesterday&mdash;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&mdash;... And
+      then I would think what I would do next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All alone, Amanda?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Wilder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only when I shoot tigers. You and mother should certainly come to Japan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Mr. Benham perhaps doesn't intend to shoot tigers, Amanda?&rdquo; said
+      Amanda's mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Asia Minor ought to be fun,&rdquo; said Amanda. &ldquo;But I should prefer India
+      because of the tigers. It would be so jolly to begin with the tigers right
+      away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the towns and governments and peoples I want to see rather than
+      tigers,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Tigers if they are in the programme. But I want to
+      find out about&mdash;other things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think there's something to be found out at home?&rdquo; said the
+      elder cousin, blushing very brightly and speaking with the effort of one
+      who speaks for conscience' sake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Betty's a Socialist,&rdquo; Amanda said to Benham with a suspicion of apology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, we're all rather that,&rdquo; Mrs. Wilder protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are free, if you are independent, then don't you owe something to
+      the workers?&rdquo; Betty went on, getting graver and redder with each word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's just because of that,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;that I am going round the
+      world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was as free with these odd people as if he had been talking to
+      Prothero. They were&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;profiteering.&rdquo; &ldquo;Consider that
+      chair,&rdquo; he said. But Benham had little feeling for the craftsmanship of
+      chairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under cross-examination Mr. Rathbone-Sanders became entangled and
+      prophetic. It was evident he had never thought out his &ldquo;democratic,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came down vehemently on Benham's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, Mr. Rathbone-Sanders,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;I felt there was
+      a sword in her spirit. I felt she was as clean as the wind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;roll and rollick in women&rdquo; 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&mdash;in
+      armour, weightless armour&mdash;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&mdash;and fled....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;Come back again,&rdquo; she had cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I found this
+      in a book-shop,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I brought it for you, because it describes
+      one of the best dreams of aristocracy there has ever been dreamt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Benham got back to London he experienced an unwonted desire to
+      perform his social obligations to the utmost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; she wrote, &ldquo;the Guardians are inhuman, but it was a
+      glorious sort of inhumanity. They had a spirit&mdash;like sharp knives
+      cutting through life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;Yes, mam,&rdquo; he heard Merkle's voice, &ldquo;yes, mam. I will tell him, mam. Will
+      you keep possession, mam.&rdquo; And then in the doorway of the study, &ldquo;Mrs.
+      Skelmersdale, sir. Upon the telephone, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham reflected with various notes in his hand. Then he went to the
+      telephone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You Wicked Boy, where have you been hiding?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been away. I may have to go away again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not before you have seen me. Come round and tell me all about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham lied about an engagement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then to-morrow in the morning.&rdquo;... Impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the afternoon. You don't WANT to see me.&rdquo; Benham did want to see her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Further lies. &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;can you come and have a talk in
+      Kensington Gardens? You know the place, near that Chinese garden.
+      Paddington Gate....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lady's voice fell to flatness. She agreed. &ldquo;But why not come to see me
+      HERE?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham hung up the receiver abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked slowly back to his study. &ldquo;Phew!&rdquo; 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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;this stupid mystery. Of course you're
+      bound to be found out, and of course there will be a scandal.&rdquo;... He
+      perceived that this last note was written on his own paper. &ldquo;Merkle!&rdquo; he
+      cried sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yessir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Merkle had been just outside, on call.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did my mother write any of these notes here?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two, sir. Her ladyship was round here three times, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she see all these letters?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not the telephone calls, sir. I 'ad put them on one side. But.... It's a
+      little thing, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and came a step nearer. &ldquo;You see, sir,&rdquo; he explained with the
+      faintest flavour of the confidential softening his mechanical respect,
+      &ldquo;yesterday, when 'er ladyship was 'ere, sir, some one rang up on the
+      telephone&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you, Merkle&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must have been,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Certainly&mdash;must have been. And the
+      call you think came from&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went out of London to think about my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was manifest that Lady Marayne did not believe him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alone?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;STUFF!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I was worried,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;London is too
+      crowded to think in. I wanted to get myself alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She awaited his explanations. Benham looked for a moment like his father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not getting on, mother,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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&mdash;and wasting existence. It's
+      rather difficult sometimes to tell what one thinks and feels&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not really listened to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is that woman,&rdquo; she interrupted suddenly, &ldquo;Mrs. Fly-by-Night, or some
+      such name, who rings you up on the telephone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham hesitated, blushed, and regretted it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Skelmersdale,&rdquo; he said after a little pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all the same. Who is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a woman I met at a studio somewhere, and I went with her to one of
+      those Dolmetsch concerts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Marayne considered him in silence for a little while. &ldquo;All men,&rdquo; she
+      said at last, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's&mdash;she's very good&mdash;in her way. She's had a difficult
+      life....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't leave a man about for a moment,&rdquo; Lady Marayne reflected. &ldquo;Poff,
+      I wish you'd fetch me a glass of water.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When he returned she was looking very fixedly into the fire. &ldquo;Put it
+      down,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;anywhere. Poff! is this Mrs. Helter-Skelter a discreet
+      sort of woman? Do you like her?&rdquo; She asked a few additional particulars
+      and Benham made his grudging admission of facts. &ldquo;What I still don't
+      understand, Poff, is why you have been away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went away,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;because I want to clear things up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why? Is there some one else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You went alone? All the time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've told you I went alone. Do you think I tell you lies, mother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody tells lies somehow,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne. &ldquo;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&mdash;or something of the
+      sort. And this seems a comparatively slight one. I wish it hadn't
+      happened. They do happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An expression of perplexity came into her face. She looked at him. &ldquo;Why do
+      you want to throw her over?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I WANT to throw her over,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From overhead he said to her: &ldquo;I want to get away from this complication,
+      this servitude. I want to do some&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she's in the way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He assented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You men!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne after a little pause. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was unexpected....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;STUFF!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne for a second time. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;well.
+      Your Mrs. Fly-by-Night,&mdash;oh it doesn't matter!&mdash;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I want to start round the world,&rdquo; he cried with a note of acute
+      distress. &ldquo;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&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;India!&rdquo; cried Lady Marayne. &ldquo;The East. Poff, what is the MATTER with you?
+      Has something happened&mdash;something else? Have you been having a love
+      affair?&mdash;a REAL love affair?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, DAMN love affairs!&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;Mother!&mdash;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&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; cried Lady Marayne, &ldquo;I see. I've bored you. I might have known I
+      should have bored you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've NOT bored me!&rdquo; cried Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw himself on the rug at her feet. &ldquo;Oh, mother!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've bored you,&rdquo; she wept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've done all I can for you, planned for you, given all my time for you
+      and I've BORED you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't come near me, Poff! Don't TOUCH me! All my plans. All my ambitions.
+      Friends&mdash;every one. You don't know all I've given up for you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go away from me! How can you help me? All I've done has been a failure!
+      Failure! Failure!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night the silences of Finacue Street heard Benham's voice again. &ldquo;I
+      must do my job,&rdquo; he was repeating, &ldquo;I must do my job. Anyhow....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then after a long pause, like a watchword and just a little unsurely:
+      &ldquo;Aristocracy....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One sort of woman perhaps....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;STUFF!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won't you?&rdquo; said Mrs. Skelmersdale,
+      brimming over. &ldquo;You will do that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He couldn't keep his arm from her little shoulders. And as their lips
+      touched he suddenly found himself weeping also....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sex business was a damnable business. If only because it made one
+      hurt women....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened and
+      tempered, who would understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; she said, hanging only for a moment, and then: &ldquo;you told me you were
+      alone!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I asked you if you were alone you pretended to be angry,&rdquo; she
+      remembered with a flash. &ldquo;You said, 'Do I tell lies?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I WAS alone. Until&mdash; It was an accident. On my walk I was alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he flinched before her accusing, her almost triumphant, forefinger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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&mdash;Was she painted, Poff?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I don't know who they are. How should I know? What need is
+      there to know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are ways of finding out,&rdquo; she insisted. &ldquo;If I am to go down and
+      make myself pleasant to these people because of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I implore you not to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And five minutes ago you were imploring me to! Of course I shall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh well!&mdash;well!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One has to know SOMETHING of the people to whom one commits oneself,
+      surely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are decent people; they are well-behaved people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&mdash;I'll behave well. Don't think I'll disgrace your casual
+      acquaintances. But who they are, what they are, I WILL know....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On that point Lady Marayne was to score beyond her utmost expectations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come round,&rdquo; she said over the telephone, two mornings later. &ldquo;I've
+      something to tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was so triumphant that she was sorry for him. When it came to telling
+      him, she failed from her fierceness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff, my little son,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I'm so sorry I hardly know how to tell
+      you. Poff, I'm sorry. I have to tell you&mdash;and it's utterly beastly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These people are dreadful people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've heard of the great Kent and Eastern Bank smash and the Marlborough
+      Building Society frauds eight or nine years ago?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vaguely. But what has that to do with them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man Morris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped short, and Benham nodded for her to go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her father,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who was Morris? Really, mother, I don't remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was sentenced to seven years&mdash;ten years&mdash;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&mdash; He had a signet ring with prussic
+      acid in it&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember now,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A silence fell between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stood quite motionless on the hearthrug and stared very hard at the
+      little volume of Henley's poetry that lay upon the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He cleared his throat presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't go and see them then,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;After all&mdash;since I am
+      going abroad so soon&mdash;... It doesn't so very much matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going round the world,&rdquo; he told them simply. &ldquo;I may be away for two
+      years, and I thought I would like to see you all again before I started.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was quite the way they did things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;so much to be
+      done,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Why did you come down here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to see you before I went.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You disturb me. You fill me with envy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't think of that. I wanted to see you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;look at them!&mdash;are my highest. And while you
+      are travelling I shall think of you&mdash;and think of you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would YOU like to travel?&rdquo; he asked as though that was an extraordinary
+      idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think EVERY girl wants to sit at home and rock a cradle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never thought YOU did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what did you think I wanted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What DO you want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She held her arms out widely, and the moonlight shone in her eyes as she
+      turned her face to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just what you want,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;&mdash;THE WHOLE WORLD!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Life is like a feast,&rdquo; she went on; &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;except to school at
+      Chichester and three or four times to Emsworth and Bognor&mdash;for eight
+      years. When you go&rdquo;&mdash;the tears glittered in the moonlight&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      shall cry. It will be worse than the excursion to London.... Ever since
+      you were here before I've been thinking of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;But why
+      shouldn't you come too?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared at him in silence. The two white-lit faces examined each other.
+      Both she and Benham were trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;COME TOO?&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;HOW?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly she was weeping like a child that is teased; her troubled
+      eyes looked out from under puckered brows. &ldquo;You don't mean it,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;You don't mean it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then indeed he meant it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marry me,&rdquo; he said very quickly, glancing towards the dark group at the
+      end of the garden. &ldquo;And we will go together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized her arm and drew her to him. &ldquo;I love you,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I love your
+      spirit. You are not like any one else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a moment's hesitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both he and she looked to see how far they were still alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then they turned their dusky faces to each other. He drew her still
+      closer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she said, and yielded herself to be kissed. Their lips touched, and
+      for a moment he held her lithe body against his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you,&rdquo; he whispered close to her. &ldquo;You are my mate. From the first
+      sight of you I knew that....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They embraced&mdash;alertly furtive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't TELL any one,&rdquo; she whispered eagerly shaking his arm to emphasize
+      her words. &ldquo;Don't tell any one&mdash;not yet. Not for a few days....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She pushed him from her quickly as the shadowy form of Betty appeared in a
+      little path between the artichokes and raspberry canes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listening to the nightingales?&rdquo; cried Betty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, aren't they?&rdquo; said Amanda inconsecutively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's our very own nightingale!&rdquo; cried Betty advancing. &ldquo;Do you hear it,
+      Mr. Benham? No, not that one. That is a quite inferior bird that performs
+      in the vicarage trees....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash; 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, &ldquo;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....&rdquo; And Mrs. Skelmersdale
+      too would say, &ldquo;Of course he just talked of the world and duty and all
+      that rubbish to save my face....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It wasn't so at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it looked so frightfully like it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't tell any one,&rdquo; she had said, &ldquo;not for a few days....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A human being,&rdquo; White read, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;MOO&rdquo; and a pitiful gesture with his arm,
+      and fled forth....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a curate and he was weeping bitterly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stood in the doorway and watched a clumsy broken-hearted flight
+      down the village street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;why was the curate in tears?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;intelligently and calmly.
+      Her pose had a divine dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to tell them now,&rdquo; said Benham without a word of greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;tell them now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They heard steps in the passage outside. &ldquo;Betty!&rdquo; cried Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her mother's voice answered, &ldquo;Do you want Betty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We want you all,&rdquo; answered Amanda. &ldquo;We have something to tell you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Carrie!&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;We want to tell you something,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda and I are going to marry each other,&rdquo; said Benham, standing in
+      front of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an instant the others made no answer; they looked at each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;BUT DOES HE KNOW?&rdquo; Mrs. Morris said in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I KNOW,&rdquo; he said, and then, &ldquo;I do not see that it matters to us in the
+      least.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went to her holding out both his hands to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took them and stood shyly for a moment, and then the watchful gravity
+      of her face broke into soft emotion. &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she cried and seized his face
+      between her hands in a passion of triumphant love and kissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he found himself being kissed by Mrs. Morris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;life force&rdquo; 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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Confound you, Amanda!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd forgotten my existence, you star-gazing Cheetah. And then, you see,
+      these things happen to you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;DON'T.... I distrust your thinking. This coast is wilder and
+      grimmer than yesterday. It's glorious....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down on the chair he unfolded for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there nothing to eat?&rdquo; she asked abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is too early.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This coast is magnificent,&rdquo; she said presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's hideous,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;It's as ugly as a heap of slag.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's nature at its wildest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's Amanda at her wildest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rdquo;!&mdash;he indicated the sleepers forward by a
+      movement of his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose they WERE rather feeble people,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Venetians.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They were traders&mdash;and nothing more. Just as we are. And when they
+      were rich they got splendid clothes and feasted and rested. Much as we
+      do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda surveyed him. &ldquo;We don't rest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We idle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are seeing things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be a humbug, Amanda. We are making love. Just as they did. And it
+      has been&mdash;ripping. In Salona they made love tremendously. They did
+      nothing else until the barbarians came over the mountains....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Amanda virtuously, &ldquo;we will do something else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham picked up the thread of his musing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was aroused by Amanda's voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When we go back to London, old Cheetah,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we must take a
+      house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some moments he stared at her, trying to get back to their point of
+      divergence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; he asked at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must have a house,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; she thought it out, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her clear hazel eyes contemplated conflicts and triumphs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was roused by Benham's voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the deuce are you thinking of, Amanda?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her level eyes to his. &ldquo;London,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;For you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want London,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you did. You ought to. I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But to take a house! Make an invasion of London!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You dear old Cheetah, you can't be always frisking about in the
+      wilderness, staring at the stars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm not going back to live in London in the old way, theatres,
+      dinner-parties, chatter&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She met his consternation fairly. She lifted her fine eyebrows. Her little
+      face conveyed a protesting reasonableness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, MUSTN'T we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She added, &ldquo;If we want to alter the world we ought to live in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Since last they had disputed the question she had thought out these new
+      phrases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Cheetah, don't you give way to your early morning habit of
+      calling your own true love a fool,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Simply I tell you I will not go back to London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will go back with me, Cheetah.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will go back as far as my work calls me there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; he said slowly, &ldquo;that this wanting to take London by storm is a
+      beastly VULGAR thing to want to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda compressed her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to work out things in my mind,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I do not want to be
+      distracted by social things, and I do not want to be distracted by
+      picturesque things. This life&mdash;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and walked to the side of the boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She surveyed his back for some moments. Then she went and leant over the
+      rail beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to go to London,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where do you want to go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where I can see into the things that hold the world together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have loved this wandering&mdash;I could wander always. But... Cheetah!
+      I tell you I WANT to go to London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked over his shoulder into her warm face. &ldquo;NO,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, I ask you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her face closer and whispered. &ldquo;Cheetah! big beast of my heart. Do
+      you hear your mate asking for something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his eyes back to the mountains. &ldquo;I must go my own way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't I, so far, invented things, made life amusing, Cheetah? Can't you
+      trust the leopard's wisdom?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at the coast inexorably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ARE that, Cheetah, that lank, long, EAGER beast&mdash;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well.&rdquo; She wrinkled her brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Amanda!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;by
+      THAT, then may I be damned for an uxorious fool!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes met his and there was mockery in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This, Cheetah, is the morning mood,&rdquo; she remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the essential mood. Listen, Amanda&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short. He looked towards the gangway, they both looked. The
+      magic word &ldquo;Breakfast&rdquo; came simultaneously from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eggs,&rdquo; she said ravenously, and led the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A smell of coffee as insistent as an herald's trumpet had called a truce
+      between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Curates,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;are such
+      pent-up men. One ought, I suppose, to remember that. But he never had
+      anything to go upon at all&mdash;not anything&mdash;except his own
+      imaginations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose when you met him you were nice to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was nice to him, of course....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moods began in which he seemed to forget Amanda altogether.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;their white walls were covered by one
+      monstrously great and old wisteria in flower&mdash;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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In these dear little nests they ought to have put lovers,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, of course, YOU would have made the place Thelema....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But as they went shaking and bumping back along the evil road to Milan, he
+      fell into a deep musing. Suddenly he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;idlers, excursionists. In a world we ought to rule....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda, we've got to get to work....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Accursed things,&rdquo; he would say, as he flung some importunate
+      cripple at a church door a ten-centime piece; &ldquo;why were they born? Why do
+      they consent to live? They are no better than some chance fungus that is
+      because it must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It takes all sorts to make a world,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Where is the megatherium? That sort of creature
+      has to go. Our sort of creature has to end it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why did you give it money?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because&mdash; I don't want the thing to be more wretched than it is. But
+      if I could prevent more of them&mdash;... What am I doing to prevent
+      them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These beggars annoy you,&rdquo; said Amanda after a pause. &ldquo;They do me. Let us
+      go back into the mountains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he fretted in the mountains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was, for example, the remarkable affair of the drive from Macugnaga
+      to Piedimulera.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Bellissima,&rdquo; &ldquo;bravissima,&rdquo; &ldquo;signorina,&rdquo; &ldquo;Inglesa,&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His bill, which he presented with an uneasy flourish, was large and
+      included the carozza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder he charged for it before we saw it,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's better than walking,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The company in the inn gathered behind the landlord and scrutinized Amanda
+      and Benham intelligently. The young couple got in. &ldquo;Avanti,&rdquo; said Benham,
+      and Amanda bestowed one last ineradicable memory on the bowing landlord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; cried Amanda suddenly. &ldquo;This isn't safe.&rdquo; &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;ASPETTO,&rdquo; he said, but he meant &ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; The driver understood that he
+      meant &ldquo;Stop,&rdquo; and obeyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Albergo cattivissimo,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Cattivissimo! Pranzo cattivissimo
+      'orrido. Cavallo cattivissimo, dangerousissimo. Gioco abominablissimo,
+      damnissimo. Capisce. Eh?&rdquo; [*]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * This is vile Italian. It may&mdash;with a certain charity to
+     Benham&mdash;be rendered: &ldquo;The beastliest inn! The beastliest!
+     The beastliest, most awful lunch! The vilest horse! Most
+     dangerous! Abominable trick! Understand?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The landlord made deprecatory gestures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;YOU understand all right,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Da me il argento per il carozzo.
+      Subito?&rdquo; [*]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * &ldquo;Give me back the money for the carriage. QUICKLY!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The landlord was understood to ask whether the signor no longer wished for
+      the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SUBITO!&rdquo; cried Benham, and giving way to a long-restrained impulse seized
+      the padrone by the collar of his coat and shook him vigorously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were dissuasive noises from the company, but no attempt at rescue.
+      Benham released his hold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Adesso!&rdquo; said Benham. [*]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * &ldquo;NOW!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;Dio have mercy on your sinful
+      soul. See! Capisce? That's all.&rdquo; [*]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * &ldquo;Now we will go with this beastly horse to Piedimulera. If
+     we get there safely I will pay. If we have an accident,
+     then&mdash;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He turned to Amanda. &ldquo;Get back into the thing,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He came to
+      the doorway and with a magnificent gesture commanded the perplexed driver
+      to turn the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While that was being done he discoursed upon his adjacent
+      fellow-creatures. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know it's dangerous, Cheetah. The horse is a shier. That man is blind
+      in one eye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get back into the carriage,&rdquo; said Benham, whitely angry. &ldquo;I AM GOING TO
+      DRIVE!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just for a moment Amanda looked scared. Then with a queer little laugh she
+      jumped in again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda was never a coward when there was excitement afoot. &ldquo;We'll smash!&rdquo;
+       she cried, by no means woefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get up beside me,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The recovering landlord became voluble in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Piedimulera pagero,&rdquo; said Benham over his shoulder and brought the
+      whip across the white outstanding ribs. &ldquo;Get up!&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda gripped the sides of the seat as the carriage started into motion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laid the whip on again with such vigour that the horse forgot
+      altogether to shy at the urchin that had scared it before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; said Benham leaning back. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MIND!&rdquo; screamed Amanda and recalled him to his duties. He was off the
+      road and he had narrowly missed an outstanding chestnut true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you don't,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Safe now,&rdquo; he said compactly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver appeared to be murmuring prayers very softly as he examined the
+      brake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda was struggling with profound problems. &ldquo;Why didn't you drive down
+      in the first place?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Without going back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The landlord annoyed me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And why didn't you let HIM drive?&rdquo; She indicated the driver by a motion
+      of the head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was angry,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;I was angry at the whole thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see I think I did that because he might have jumped off if I hadn't
+      been up there to prevent him&mdash;I mean if we had had a smash. I didn't
+      want him to get out of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you too&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see I was angry....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's been as good as a switchback,&rdquo; said Amanda after reflection. &ldquo;But
+      weren't you a little careless about me, Cheetah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never thought of you,&rdquo; said Benham, and then as if he felt that
+      inadequate: &ldquo;You see&mdash;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&mdash;as those brutes up there live it. I want to clear
+      out the whole hot, dirty, little aimless nest of them....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I'm sure,&rdquo; he repeated after a pause as though he had been digesting
+      something &ldquo;I wasn't thinking about you at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash; 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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;wrought of clean fire, but her
+      sister?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;they seemed a very girlish lot
+      of girls; and an Amanda who was very knowing&mdash;knowing was the only
+      word for it&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were so many Amandas, they were as innumerable as the Venuses&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and that Amanda came back to him no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda too was making her observations and discoveries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;We can do this sort of thing all right,&rdquo; said Amanda
+      and Benham. &ldquo;But we mustn't lose the way again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Scutari,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;we will get an extra horse and a tent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The way presently became a lake and they reached Scutari by boat towards
+      the dawn of the next day....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;BUONA NOTTE,&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The singer had taken up his position at their feet and faced them. It was
+      a compliment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;OH!&rdquo; said Amanda, rolling over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this does not give a full account of the animation of the khan. &ldquo;OH!&rdquo;
+       said Amanda, rolling over again with the suddenness of accumulated anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're worse than in Scutari,&rdquo; said Benham, understanding her trouble
+      instantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't days and nights we are having,&rdquo; said Benham a few days later,
+      &ldquo;it's days and nightmares.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Sometimes they will wait for you at a ford or a broken bridge,&rdquo;
+       he said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a revolver,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was after that that he closed with Giorgio.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near his feet was an ashen glow that gave no light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first perplexity gave way to dismay at finding no Amanda by his side.
+      &ldquo;Amanda!&rdquo; he cried....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice floated down through a chink in the floor above. &ldquo;What can it
+      be, Cheetah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then: &ldquo;It's coming nearer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;CHE E?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Giorgio!&rdquo; he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cavasse made an arresting gesture and followed discreetly and
+      noiselessly after the others, leaving Benham alone in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had they gone out? Were they standing at the door looking out into the
+      night and listening?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda had found the chink and her voice sounded nearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a woman,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;RAIN!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then slowly and stumbling up the ladder the men began to return to
+      Benham's room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask them what it is,&rdquo; urged Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here we are,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That little crowd in the square at Scutari&mdash; That was a murder. I
+      didn't tell you at the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I knew it was,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They sing,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Benham and reflected, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Sussex labourers don't sing,&rdquo; said Amanda. &ldquo;These people sing well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man with the gold inlaid pistols and the diamonds on his yataghan. He
+      wanted to show them to us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. You let him see you admired him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I liked the things on his stall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he has killed nearly thirty people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In duels?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does nobody kill him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to,&rdquo; said Benham and became thoughtful for a time. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But doesn't a blood feud come down on him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But doesn't the law&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's no law. Only custom and the Turkish tax collector.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They fight for freedom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no one has ever conquered these people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He slipped off the parapet, too impatient to sit any longer, and began to
+      pace up and down in the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;who
+      have the light&mdash;WANDERING! Just wandering!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders and came to stare at the torrent under the
+      bridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're getting ripe for London, Cheetah,&rdquo; said Amanda softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want somehow to get to work, to get my hands on definite things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can we get back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had to repeat her question presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before they reached the world of their own times Macedonia was to show
+      them something grimmer than Albania.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were riding through a sunlit walnut wood beyond Ochrida when they
+      came upon the thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham caught Amanda's bridle so that she had to give her attention to her
+      steed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ahead!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;Ahead! Look, a village!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (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.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the trees now they could see houses. He quickened his pace and
+      jerked Amanda's horse forward....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the village was a still one. Not a dog barked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here was an incredible village without even a dog!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; cried Amanda, with her voice going up. &ldquo;They've been killed.
+      Some one has killed them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham halted beside her and stared stupidly. &ldquo;It's a band,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;It's&mdash;propaganda. Greeks or Turks or Bulgarians.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But their feet and hands are fastened! And&mdash;... WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN
+      DOING TO THEM?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to kill,&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;Oh! I want to kill people. Come on,
+      Amanda! It blisters one's eyes. Come away. Come away! Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face was white and her eyes terror-stricken. She obeyed him
+      mechanically. She gave one last look at those bodies....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down the deep-rutted soil of the village street they clattered. They came
+      to houses that had been set on fire....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is that hanging from a tree?&rdquo; cried Amanda. &ldquo;Oh, oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come on....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind them rode the others scared and hurrying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Giorgio and the others came clattering to overtake them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Giorgio was too full to wait for questions. He talked eagerly to Benham's
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have happened yesterday, he explained. They were Bulgarians&mdash;traitors.
+      They had been converted to the Patriarchists by the Greeks&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Flies,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;in the sunlight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent for a time and then he repeated the same words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly he began to declaim. &ldquo;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Grip the savage by the throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To Amanda it sounded like delirium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;CHEETAH!&rdquo; she said suddenly between remonstrance and a cry of terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The darkness suddenly became quite still. He did not move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was afraid. &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she said again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, Amanda?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought&mdash;. Are you all right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do you feel well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got this cold I caught in Ochrida. I suppose I'm feverish. But&mdash;yes,
+      I'm well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were talking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry,&rdquo; he said after another long pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;In Monastir there will be a doctor,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Monastir is a big
+      place. In Monastir I will see a doctor. I want a doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you get to Monastir, young man,&rdquo; she told him, inaudibly, &ldquo;you will
+      go straight to bed and we'll see what has to be done with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;AMMALATO,&rdquo; said Giorgio confidentially, coming abreast of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MEDICO IN MONASTIR,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SI,&mdash;MOLTI MEDICI, MONASTIR,&rdquo; Giorgio agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The goatherd, reclining under the shadow of a rock, awaited Benham's
+      embarrassment with an indolent malice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You UNCIVILIZED Beasts!&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;BANG!&rdquo; came a flight of lead within a yard
+      of Benham, and then the goatherd was in retreat behind a rock and Giorgio
+      was shouting &ldquo;AVANTI, AVANTI!&rdquo; to Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am tired of dogs,&rdquo; Benham said. &ldquo;Tired to death of dogs. All savage
+      dogs must be shot. All through the world. I am tired&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dogs must be shot,&rdquo; said Benham, exalted. &ldquo;Dogs must be shot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless they are GOOD dogs,&rdquo; said Amanda, keeping beside him with an eye
+      on his revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless they are good dogs to every one,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's ghastly face was now bedewed with sweat and he swayed in his
+      saddle as he rode. &ldquo;This is NOT civilization, Amanda,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this is
+      NOT civilization.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then suddenly with extraordinary pathos:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I want to go to BED! I want to go to BED! A bed with sheets....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;quite a civilized hotel....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;theser&rdquo; and THOSE was
+      pronounced &ldquo;thoser,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;May, Ah! Slays,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned over the pages and pointed to a word. &ldquo;May! Ah! Slays!&rdquo; he
+      repeated, reproachfully, almost bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, MEASLES!&rdquo; cried Amanda....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the spirited honeymoon passed its zenith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's plans were comprehensive but entirely vague; Amanda had not so
+      much plans as intentions....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIFTH ~~ THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;Sex,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that the autobiography stopped short, and the intercalary note began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This intercalary note ran as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The writing changed at this point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;so many things that no common
+      Man of Spirit will resign. Its intention transcends these things. Over all
+      the world it would maintain justice, order, a noble peace, and it would do
+      this without indignation, without resentment, without mawkish tenderness
+      or individualized enthusiasm or any queen of beauty. It is of a cold
+      austere quality, commanding sometimes admiration but having small hold
+      upon the affections of men. So that it is among its foremost distinctions
+      that its heart is steeled....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There this odd fragment ended and White was left to resume the interrupted
+      autobiography.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What moods, what passions, what nights of despair and gathering storms of
+      anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are buried and
+      hidden and implied in every love story! What a waste is there of exquisite
+      things! So each spring sees a million glorious beginnings, a sunlit heaven
+      in every opening leaf, warm perfection in every stirring egg, hope and
+      fear and beauty beyond computation in every forest tree; and in the autumn
+      before the snows come they have all gone, of all that incalculable
+      abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure, excitement and
+      deliciousness, there is scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a
+      dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould or a rotting feather....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White held the ten or twelve pencilled pages that told how Benham and
+      Amanda drifted into antagonism and estrangement and as he held it he
+      thought of the laughter and delight they must have had together, the
+      exquisite excitements of her eye, the racing colour of her cheek, the
+      gleams of light upon her skin, the flashes of wit between them, the sense
+      of discovery, the high rare paths they had followed, the pools in which
+      they had swum together. And now it was all gone into nothingness, there
+      was nothing left of it, nothing at all, but just those sheets of
+      statement, and it may be, stored away in one single mind, like things
+      forgotten in an attic, a few neglected faded memories....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And even those few sheets of statement were more than most love leaves
+      behind it. For a time White would not read them. They lay neglected on his
+      knee as he sat back in Benham's most comfortable chair and enjoyed an
+      entirely beautiful melancholy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White too had seen and mourned the spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, poor dear! he had seen and mourned several springs....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sigh he took up the manuscript and read Benham's desiccated story
+      of intellectual estrangement, and how in the end he had decided to leave
+      his wife and go out alone upon that journey of inquiry he had been
+      planning when first he met her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda had come back to England in a state of extravagantly vigorous
+      womanhood. Benham's illness, though it lasted only two or three weeks,
+      gave her a sense of power and leadership for which she had been struggling
+      instinctively ever since they came together. For a time at Locarno he was
+      lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she formed her bright and
+      limited plans for London. Benham had no plans as yet but only a sense of
+      divergence, as though he was being pulled in opposite directions by two
+      irresistible forces. To her it was plain that he needed occupation, some
+      distinguished occupation, and she could imagine nothing better for him
+      than a political career. She perceived he had personality, that he stood
+      out among men so that his very silences were effective. She loved him
+      immensely, and she had tremendous ambitions for him and through him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with appetite. Her
+      soul thirsted for London. It was like some enormous juicy fruit waiting
+      for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large enough to give her
+      avidity the sense of enough. She felt it waiting for her, household,
+      servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly delight of buying and possessing
+      things, the opera, first-nights, picture exhibitions, great
+      dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties, crowds seen from a point of
+      vantage, the carriage in a long string of fine carriages with the lamplit
+      multitude peering, Amanda in a thousand bright settings, in a thousand
+      various dresses. She had had love; it had been glorious, it was still
+      glorious, but her love-making became now at times almost perfunctory in
+      the contemplation of these approaching delights and splendours and
+      excitements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in Benham's head; but she was a
+      realist. She did not see why ideas should stand in the way of a career.
+      Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind. One talks ideas, but
+      THE THING THAT IS, IS THE THING THAT IS. And though she believed that
+      Benham had a certain strength of character of his own, she had that sort
+      of confidence in his love for her and in the power of her endearments that
+      has in it the assurance of a faint contempt. She had mingled pride and
+      sense in the glorious realization of the power over him that her wit and
+      beauty gave her. She had held him faint with her divinity, intoxicated
+      with the pride of her complete possession, and she did not dream that the
+      moment when he should see clearly that she could deliberately use these
+      ultimate delights to rule and influence him, would be the end of their
+      splendour and her power. Her nature, which was just a nest of vigorous
+      appetites, was incapable of suspecting his gathering disillusionment until
+      it burst upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now with her attention set upon London ahead he could observe her. In the
+      beginning he had never seemed to be observing her at all, they dazzled one
+      another; it seemed extraordinary now to him to note how much he had been
+      able to disregard. There were countless times still when he would have
+      dropped his observation and resumed that mutual exaltation very gladly,
+      but always now other things possessed her mind....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was still an immense pleasure for him in her vigour; there was
+      something delightful in her pounce, even when she was pouncing on things
+      superficial, vulgar or destructive. She made him understand and share the
+      excitement of a big night at the opera, the glitter and prettiness of a
+      smart restaurant, the clustering little acute adventures of a great
+      reception of gay people, just as she had already made him understand and
+      sympathize with dogs. She picked up the art world where he had laid it
+      down, and she forced him to feel dense and slow before he rebelled against
+      her multitudinous enthusiasms and admirations. South Harting had had its
+      little group of artistic people; it is not one of your sleepy villages,
+      and she slipped back at once into the movement. Those were the great days
+      of John, the days before the Post Impressionist outbreak. John, Orpen,
+      Tonks, she bought them with vigour. Artistic circles began to revolve
+      about her. Very rapidly she was in possession.... And among other
+      desirable things she had, it seemed, pounced upon and captured Lady
+      Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At any rate it was clear that that awful hostile silence and aloofness was
+      to end. Benham never quite mastered how it was done. But Amanda had gone
+      in one morning to Desborough Street, very sweetly and chastely dressed,
+      had abased herself and announced a possible (though subsequently
+      disproved) grandchild. And she had appreciated the little lady so highly
+      and openly, she had so instantly caught and reproduced her tone, that her
+      success, though only temporary in its completeness, was immediate. In the
+      afternoon Benham was amazed by the apparition of his mother amidst the
+      scattered unsettled furnishings of the new home Amanda had chosen in
+      Lancaster Gate. He was in the hall, the door stood open awaiting
+      packing-cases from a van without. In the open doorway she shone, looking
+      the smallest of dainty things. There was no effect of her coming but only
+      of her having arrived there, as a little blue butterfly will suddenly
+      alight on a flower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Poff!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne, ignoring abysses, &ldquo;What are you up to
+      now, Poff? Come and embrace me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not so,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;stiffest of sons....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid hold of his ears in the old fashion and kissed one eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Congratulations, dear little Poff. Oh! congratulations! In heaps. I'm so
+      GLAD.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now what was that for?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Amanda came out upon the landing upstairs, saw the encounter with
+      an involuntary cry of joy, and came downstairs with arms wide open. It was
+      the first intimation he had of their previous meeting. He was for some
+      minutes a stunned, entirely inadequate Benham....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a few people in the
+      Hampstead Garden suburb that she had not the slightest wish to know, and
+      then very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of people. The artistic
+      circle brought in people, Lady Marayne brought in people; they spread. It
+      was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young couple; he would
+      certainly do something considerable presently, and she was bright and
+      daring, jolly to look at and excellent fun, and, when you came to talk to
+      her, astonishingly well informed. They passed from one hostess's hand to
+      another: they reciprocated. The Clynes people and the Rushtones took her
+      up; Mr. Evesham was amused by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed her
+      charm like a trumpet, the Young Liberal people made jealous advances, Lord
+      Moggeridge found she listened well, she lit one of the brightest weekend
+      parties Lady Marayne had ever gathered at Chexington. And her descriptions
+      of recent danger and adventure in Albania not only entertained her hearers
+      but gave her just that flavour of personal courage which completes the
+      fascination of a young woman. People in the gaps of a halting dinner-table
+      conversation would ask: &ldquo;Have you met Mrs. Benham?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking. A smiling and successful young
+      woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl with a good
+      lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely engaged, or at least
+      friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, may be
+      forgiven if in the full tide of her success she does not altogether grasp
+      the intention of her husband's discourse. It seemed to her that he was
+      obsessed by a responsibility for civilization and the idea that he was
+      aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined to doubt whether he was justified
+      in calling himself aristocratic; at the best his mother was county-stuff;
+      but still if he did there was no great harm in it nowadays.) Clearly his
+      line was Tory-Democracy, social reform through the House of Lords and
+      friendly intimacy with the more spirited young peers. And it was only very
+      slowly and reluctantly that she was forced to abandon this satisfactory
+      solution of his problem. She reproduced all the equipment and comforts of
+      his Finacue Street study in their new home, she declared constantly that
+      she would rather forego any old social thing than interfere with his work,
+      she never made him go anywhere with her without first asking if his work
+      permitted it. To relieve him of the burthen of such social attentions she
+      even made a fag or so. The making of fags out of manifestly stricken men,
+      the keeping of tamed and hopeless admirers, seemed to her to be the most
+      natural and reasonable of feminine privileges. They did their useful
+      little services until it pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own. That
+      was how she put it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
+      ignored. He was manifestly losing his temper with her. There was a novel
+      austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face on certain
+      occasions that lingered in her memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was indeed making elaborate explanations. He said that what he wanted
+      to do was to understand &ldquo;the collective life of the world,&rdquo; and that this
+      was not to be done in a West-End study. He had an extraordinary contempt,
+      it seemed, for both sides in the drama of British politics. He had
+      extravagant ideas of beginning in some much more fundamental way. He
+      wanted to understand this &ldquo;collective life of the world,&rdquo; because
+      ultimately he wanted to help control it. (Was there ever such nonsense?)
+      The practical side of this was serious enough, however; he was back at his
+      old idea of going round the earth. Later on that might be rather a jolly
+      thing to do, but not until they had struck root a little more surely in
+      London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she began to
+      realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon this vague
+      extravagant research, that all this work she had been doing to make a
+      social place for him in London was as nothing to him, that he was thinking
+      of himself as separable from her....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Cheetah! How can you leave your spotless leopard? You would howl in
+      the lonely jungle!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Possibly I shall. But I am going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I shall come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo; He considered her reasons. &ldquo;You see you are not interested.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not as I am. You would turn it all into a jolly holiday. You don't want
+      to see things as I want to do. You want romance. All the world is a show
+      for you. As a show I can't endure it. I want to lay hands on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Cheetah!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;this is separation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have your life here. And I shall come back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Cheetah! How can we be separated?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are separated,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes became round with astonishment. Then her face puckered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she cried in a voice of soft distress, &ldquo;I love you. What do you
+      mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and
+      shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't say we are separated,&rdquo; she whispered, putting her still wet face
+      close to his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. We're mates,&rdquo; he answered softly, with his arm about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How could we ever keep away from each uvver?&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How COULD we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered aloud. &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I mean to go round the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is to become of me,&rdquo; she asked suddenly in a voice of despair,
+      &ldquo;while you go round the world? If you desert me in London,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;if
+      you shame me by deserting me in London&mdash; If you leave me, I will
+      never forgive you, Cheetah! Never.&rdquo; Then in an almost breathless voice,
+      and as if she spoke to herself, &ldquo;Never in all my days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children. There was
+      nothing involuntary about Amanda. &ldquo;Soon,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we must begin to
+      think of children. Not just now, but a little later. It's good to travel
+      and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are children in the
+      background. No woman is really content until she is a mother....&rdquo; And for
+      nearly a fortnight nothing more was said about that solitary journey round
+      the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk. She set herself
+      with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there were other men
+      in the world. The convenient fags, sometimes a little embarrassed, found
+      their inobtrusive services being brought into the light before Benham's
+      eyes. Most of them were much older men than himself, elderly philanderers
+      of whom it seemed to him no sane man need be jealous, men often of forty
+      or more, but one was a contemporary, Sir Philip Easton, a man with a touch
+      of Spanish blood and a suggestion of Spanish fire, who quite manifestly
+      was very much in love with Amanda and of whom she spoke with a slight
+      perceptible difference of manner that made Benham faintly uneasy. He was
+      ashamed of the feeling. Easton it seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine
+      honour, so that Amanda could trust herself with him to an extent that
+      would have been inadvisable with men of a commoner substance, and he had a
+      gift of understanding and sympathy that was almost feminine; he could
+      cheer one up when one was lonely and despondent. For Amanda was so
+      methodical in the arrangement of her time that even in the full rush of a
+      London season she could find an hour now and then for being lonely and
+      despondent. And he was a liberal and understanding purchaser of the
+      ascendant painters; he understood that side of Amanda's interests, a side
+      upon which Benham was notably deficient....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?&mdash;Sir
+      Philip Easton?&rdquo; said Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Benham after consideration. &ldquo;I don't intend to be a wife-herd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wife-herd&mdash;same as goat-herd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff&mdash;nowadays.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's exactly what I mean. I can understand the kind of curator's interest
+      an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but to spend my
+      days looking after one person who ought to be able to look after herself&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's very young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's quite grown up. Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you leave her about and go abroad&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has she been talking to you, mother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The thing shows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But about my going abroad?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She said something, my little Poff.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference was
+      something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking inordinately.
+      He weighed his words before he spoke again. &ldquo;If Amanda chooses to threaten
+      me with a sort of conditional infidelity, I don't see that it ought to
+      change the plans I have made for my life....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No aristocrat has any right to be jealous,&rdquo; Benham wrote. &ldquo;If he chances
+      to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or naturally go his
+      way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel her to go his way.
+      What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion through morasses of
+      uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the use of dragging even a
+      willing pretender, who has no inherent will to seek and live the
+      aristocratic life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
+      Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of her, the
+      sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly
+      resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of thinking her over had
+      gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been preoccupied
+      with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a sense of
+      extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her, of being
+      unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone conclusions.
+      He was ready now even with the details of his project. She should go on
+      with her life in London exactly as she had planned it. He would take
+      fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might spend
+      without check or stint as it pleased her. He was going round the world for
+      one or two years. It was even possible he would not go alone. There was a
+      man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don called Prothero
+      who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out his ideas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should
+      happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily told
+      her that this only hardened his heart. She perceived that she must make a
+      softer appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive and imitate the
+      spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the first time
+      clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to bear a child.
+      &ldquo;He cannot go if I am going to have a child,&rdquo; she told herself. But that
+      would mean illness, and for illness in herself or others Amanda had the
+      intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet even illness would be better
+      than this intolerable publication of her husband's ability to leave her
+      side....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith
+      to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him. Her
+      dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I want to have children, but I must go round the world
+      none the less.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind. She
+      argued with persistence and repetition. And then suddenly so that she was
+      astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and she
+      was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-forgetful; she
+      was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale green, that set off her
+      slim erect body and the strong clear lines of her neck and shoulders very
+      beautifully, some greenish stones caught a light from without and flashed
+      soft whispering gleams from amidst the misty darkness of her hair. She was
+      going to Lady Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for a dinner at the
+      House with some young Liberals at which he was to meet two representative
+      Indians with a grievance from Bengal. Husband and wife had but a few
+      moments together. She asked about his company and he told her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will tell you about India.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood for a moment looking out across the lights and the dark green
+      trees, and then she turned to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why cannot I come with you?&rdquo; she asked with sudden passion. &ldquo;Why cannot I
+      see the things you want to see?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you you are not interested. You would only be interested through
+      me. That would not help me. I should just be dealing out my premature
+      ideas to you. If you cared as I care, if you wanted to know as I want to
+      know, it would be different. But you don't. It isn't your fault that you
+      don't. It happens so. And there is no good in forced interest, in
+      prescribed discovery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah,&rdquo; she asked, &ldquo;what is it that you want to know&mdash;that I don't
+      care for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to know about the world. I want to rule the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you want to have the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't it the same?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. You're a greedier thing than I am, you Black Leopard you&mdash;standing
+      there in the dusk. You're a stronger thing. Don't you know you're
+      stronger? When I am with you, you carry your point, because you are more
+      concentrated, more definite, less scrupulous. When you run beside me you
+      push me out of my path.... You've made me afraid of you.... And so I won't
+      go with you, Leopard. I go alone. It isn't because I don't love you. I
+      love you too well. It isn't because you aren't beautiful and
+      wonderful....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for this that you want than you
+      care for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham thought of it. &ldquo;I suppose I do,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it that you want? Still I don't understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice had the break of one who would keep reasonable in spite of pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you ought to tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if I can tell you,&rdquo; he said very thoughtfully, and rested his
+      hands on his hips. &ldquo;I shall seem ridiculous to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought to tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think what I want is to be king of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood quite still staring at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know how I can tell you of it. Amanda, do you remember those
+      bodies&mdash;you saw those bodies&mdash;those mutilated men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw them,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well. Is it nothing to you that those things happen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They must happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. They happen because there are no kings but pitiful kings. They happen
+      because the kings love their Amandas and do not care.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what can YOU do, Cheetah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very little. But I can give my life and all my strength. I can give all I
+      can give.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how? How can you help it&mdash;help things like that massacre?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong with my world and rule it
+      and set it right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;YOU! Alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Other men do as much. Every one who does so helps others to do so. You
+      see&mdash;... In this world one may wake in the night and one may resolve
+      to be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king. Does that sound
+      foolishness to you? Anyhow, it's fair that I should tell you, though you
+      count me a fool. This&mdash;this kingship&mdash;this dream of the night&mdash;is
+      my life. It is the very core of me. Much more than you are. More than
+      anything else can be. I mean to be a king in this earth. KING. I'm not
+      mad.... I see the world staggering from misery to misery and there is
+      little wisdom, less rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things
+      come by chance and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my
+      world and I am responsible. Every man to whom this light has come is
+      responsible. As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your kingship
+      is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no delight, except in
+      work, in service, in utmost effort. As far as I can do it I will rule my
+      world. I cannot abide in this smug city, I cannot endure its
+      self-complacency, its routine, its gloss of success, its rottenness.... I
+      shall do little, perhaps I shall do nothing, but what I can understand and
+      what I can do I will do. Think of that wild beautiful country we saw, and
+      the mean misery, the filth and the warring cruelty of the life that lives
+      there, tragedy, tragedy without dignity; and think, too, of the limitless
+      ugliness here, and of Russia slipping from disorder to massacre, and
+      China, that sea of human beings, sliding steadily to disaster. Do you
+      think these are only things in the newspapers? To me at any rate they are
+      not things in newspapers; they are pain and failure, they are torment,
+      they are blood and dust and misery. They haunt me day and night. Even if
+      it is utterly absurd I will still do my utmost. It IS absurd. I'm a madman
+      and you and my mother are sensible people.... And I will go my way.... I
+      don't care for the absurdity. I don't care a rap.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There you have it, Amanda. It's rant, perhaps. Sometimes I feel it's
+      rant. And yet it's the breath of life to me.... There you are.... At last
+      I've been able to break silence and tell you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped with something like a sob and stood regarding the dusky mystery
+      of her face. She stood quite still, she was just a beautiful outline in
+      the twilight, her face was an indistinctness under the black shadow of her
+      hair, with eyes that were two patches of darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the time. His
+      voice changed. &ldquo;Well&mdash;if you provoke a man enough, you see he makes
+      speeches. Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda. Here we are talking instead
+      of going to our dinners. The car has been waiting ten minutes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly. In an instant she had
+      ceased to plot against him. A vast wave of emotion swept her forward to a
+      resolution that astonished her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed, &ldquo;give
+      me one thing. Stay until June with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because&mdash;now&mdash;no, I don't want to keep you any more&mdash;I am
+      not trying to hold you any more.... I want....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah,&rdquo; she whispered almost inaudibly, &ldquo;Cheetah&mdash;I didn't
+      understand. But now&mdash;. I want to bear your child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was astonished. &ldquo;Old Leopard!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing very
+      close to him, &ldquo;Queen&mdash;-if I can be&mdash;to your King.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want to bear me a child!&rdquo; he whispered, profoundly moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of Commons
+      came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer. And over against Amanda
+      at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of those men who know that
+      their judgments are quoted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?&rdquo; he asked of his
+      neighbour in confidential undertones....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tittered. &ldquo;I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY aware
+      that the man to her left is talking to her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was now a
+      fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in some
+      way Prothero was necessary to his mind. It was as if he looked to Prothero
+      to keep him real. He suspected even while he obeyed that upward flourish
+      which was his own essential characteristic. He had a peculiar feeling that
+      somehow that upward bias would betray him; that from exaltation he might
+      presently float off, into the higher, the better, and so to complete
+      unreality. He fled from priggishness and the terror of such sublimity
+      alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation to so many things Prothero in a
+      peculiar distinctive manner SAW. He had less self-control than Benham,
+      less integrity of purpose, less concentration, and things that were before
+      his eyes were by the very virtue of these defects invariably visible to
+      him. Things were able to insist upon themselves with him. Benham, on the
+      other hand, when facts contradicted his purpose too stoutly, had a way of
+      becoming blind to them. He repudiated inconvenient facts. He mastered and
+      made his world; Prothero accepted and recorded his. Benham was a will
+      towards the universe where Prothero was a perception and Amanda a
+      confusing responsive activity. And it was because of his realization of
+      this profound difference between them that he was possessed by the idea of
+      taking Prothero with him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision&mdash;rather
+      like that eye the Graiae used to hand one another....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms in
+      Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue
+      sky, seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholarship pervaded them&mdash;a
+      little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not
+      completely forgotten. Prothero's door had been locked against the world,
+      and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only
+      apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better
+      part of a second. He might have been asleep, he might have been doing
+      anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men
+      exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before
+      Benham' s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host to
+      the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects of
+      the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the
+      distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red,
+      incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an air of
+      having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE, its cover proclaimed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His host followed that glance and blushed. &ldquo;They send me all sorts of
+      inappropriate stuff to review,&rdquo; he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he was denouncing celibacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The transition wasn't very clear to Benham. His mind had been preoccupied
+      by the problem of how to open his own large project. Meanwhile Prothero
+      got, as it were, the conversational bit between his teeth and bolted. He
+      began to say the most shocking things right away, so that Benham's
+      attention was caught in spite of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Inflammatory classics.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;I can't stand
+      it any longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world, such
+      a statement might have been credible. Even in his own life,&mdash;it was
+      now indeed a remote, forgotten stage&mdash;there had been something
+      distantly akin....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're going to marry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who's the lady, Billy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. Venus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly. &ldquo;So far as I know, it
+      is Venus Anadyomene.&rdquo; A flash of laughter passed across his face and left
+      it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. &ldquo;I like her best,
+      anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! I feel that almost any of them&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut, tut!&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face? I am
+      not pronouncing an immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. I am
+      telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I feel. I want&mdash;Venus. I
+      don't want her to talk to or anything of that sort.... I have been
+      studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning,
+      instead of doing any work. Would you like to see it?... NO!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad. It is a peculiarly
+      erotic spring. I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend to
+      ordinary conversation. These feelings, I understand, are by no means
+      peculiar to myself.... No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now
+      that the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in you said, 'How are
+      you?' I am telling you how I am. You brought it on yourself. Well&mdash;I
+      am&mdash;inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious convictions to
+      assist me either to endure or deny this&mdash;this urgency. And so why
+      should I deny it? It's one of our chief problems here. The majority of my
+      fellow dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and
+      combination-room are in just the same case as myself. The fever in oneself
+      detects the fever in others. I know their hidden thoughts. Their fishy
+      eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts. Each covers his miserable
+      secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference. A tattered
+      cloak.... Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible vice of
+      continence&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy, what's the matter with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero grimaced impatience. &ldquo;Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a humbug,
+      Benham?&rdquo; he screamed, and in screaming became calmer. &ldquo;Nature taunts me,
+      maddens me. My life is becoming a hell of shame. 'Get out from all these
+      books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.' The Flesh, Benham. Yes&mdash;I
+      insist&mdash;the Flesh. Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any man a pure
+      spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage, with too much
+      port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked Aspasia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mutual, perhaps, Billy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! you can sneer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, clearly&mdash;Saint Paul is my authority&mdash;it's marriage,
+      Billy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero had walked to the window. He turned round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I CAN'T marry,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The trouble has gone too far. I've lost my
+      nerve in the presence of women. I don't like them any more. They come at
+      one&mdash;done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about all
+      sorts of things that don't matter....&rdquo; He surveyed his friend's thoughtful
+      attitude. &ldquo;I'm getting to hate women, Benham. I'm beginning now to
+      understand the bitterness of spinsters against men. I'm beginning to grasp
+      the unkindliness of priests. The perpetual denial. To you, happily
+      married, a woman is just a human being. You can talk to her, like her, you
+      can even admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge against
+      her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy! this is delusion,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What's come over you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm telling you,&rdquo; said Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero awaited some further utterance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm looking for the cause of it. It's feeding, Billy. It's port and
+      stimulants where there is no scope for action. It's idleness. I begin to
+      see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers. Look at that filing
+      system like an arsenal of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow not
+      idleness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's still bodily idleness. No. That's your trouble. You're stuffy.
+      You've enlarged your liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning after
+      an extravagant breakfast&mdash;. And peep and covet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just eggs and bacon!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. Come out of it, Billy, and
+      get aired.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's an infernally warm morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Walk with me to Grantchester.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might go by boat. You could row.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WALK.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to do these papers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You weren't doing them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours is&mdash;horrid&mdash;and
+      just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come with me to Russia
+      and about the world. I'm going to leave my wife&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave your wife!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead you
+      are in this disgusting state. I've never met anything in my life so hot
+      and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one talk to
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You pull things down to your own level,&rdquo; said Benham as they went through
+      the heat to Grantchester.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I pull them down to truth,&rdquo; panted Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and discipline
+      and training some sort of falsity!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the
+      background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not talking of Love,&rdquo; he said, remaining persistently outrageous.
+      &ldquo;I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of arranging
+      systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is physically
+      possible....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why don't we up and find out?&rdquo; said Billy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that
+      surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came
+      to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our
+      indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with awe and
+      terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in particular
+      should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to traditional
+      suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? &ldquo;What is the wisdom of the ages?&rdquo;
+       said Prothero. &ldquo;Think of the corners where that wisdom was born....
+      Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise man with a
+      rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?&rdquo; protested Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter
+      experience. Most of it was better forgotten. It didn't convince. It had
+      never worked things out. In this matter just as in every other matter that
+      really signified things had still to be worked out. Nothing had been
+      worked out hitherto. The wisdom of the ages was a Cant. People had been
+      too busy quarrelling, fighting and running away. There wasn't any digested
+      experience of the ages at all. Only the mis-remembered hankey-pankey of
+      the Dead Old Man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or isn't
+      it?&rdquo; Prothero demanded. &ldquo;There's a simple question enough, and is there
+      anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages to tell me yes or
+      no? Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and vigorous as a mated man? Is
+      a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being? Can she be? I don't
+      believe so. Then why in thunder do we let her be? Here am I at a centre of
+      learning and wisdom and I don't believe so; and there is nothing in all
+      our colleges, libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here, to settle that
+      plain question for me, plainly and finally. My life is a grubby torment of
+      cravings because it isn't settled. If sexual activity IS a part of the
+      balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set about making it
+      accessible and harmless and have done with it. Swedish exercises. That
+      sort of thing. If it isn't, if it can be reduced and done without, then
+      let us set about teaching people HOW to control themselves and reduce and
+      get rid of this vehement passion. But all this muffled mystery, this
+      pompous sneak's way we take with it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Billy! How can one settle these things? It's a matter of
+      idiosyncrasy. What is true for one man isn't true for another. There's
+      infinite difference of temperaments!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral code for
+      each sort? Why am I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for Rigdon
+      the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like a glove? It isn't convenient
+      for me. It fits me like a hair-shirt. Of course there are temperaments,
+      but why can't we formulate them and exercise the elementary charity of
+      recognizing that one man's health in these matters is another man's death?
+      Some want love and gratification and some don't. There are people who want
+      children and people who don't want to be bothered by children but who are
+      full of vivid desires. There are people whose only happiness is chastity,
+      and women who would rather be courtesans than mothers. Some of us would
+      concentrate upon a single passion or a single idea; others overflow with a
+      miscellaneous&mdash;tenderness. Yes,&mdash;and you smile! Why spit upon
+      and insult a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin at it? Why try
+      every one by the standards that suit oneself? We're savages, Benham,
+      shamefaced savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was angry about sex by seventeen,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Every year I live I
+      grow angrier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex that is
+      going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these thousands
+      full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it together; we
+      work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and casual stories,
+      patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders, disease, trouble,
+      escapes; and the next generation will start, and the next generation after
+      that will start with nothing but your wisdom of the ages, which isn't
+      wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos and mystery and the
+      secretive cunning of the savage....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I really want to do is my work,&rdquo; said Prothero, going off quite
+      unexpectedly again. &ldquo;That is why all this business, this incessant craving
+      and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There I'm with you,&rdquo; cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent of
+      Prothero's prepossessions. &ldquo;What we want to do is our work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting the
+      word again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's this, that you call Work, that I call&mdash;what do I call it?&mdash;living
+      the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of this
+      business. If it was only submission.... YOU think it is only submission&mdash;giving
+      way.... It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all right, we'd be the
+      happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't know all the time that
+      there was something else to live for, something far more important. And
+      different. Absolutely different and contradictory. So different that it
+      cuts right across all these considerations. It won't fit in.... I don't
+      know what this other thing is; it's what I want to talk about with you.
+      But I know that it IS, in all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands
+      control, it demands continence, it insists upon disregard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to
+      Prothero that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mankind,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates us.
+      It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent
+      necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as being
+      married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love story....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied,&rdquo; said Prothero,
+      sticking stoutly to his own view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester
+      after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and recover
+      that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the imagination of
+      Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero's troubles as soar
+      over them. It is the last triumph of the human understanding to sympathize
+      with desires we do not share, and to Benham who now believed himself to be
+      loved beyond the chances of life, who was satisfied and tranquil and
+      austerely content, it was impossible that Prothero's demands should seem
+      anything more than the grotesque and squalid squealings of the beast that
+      has to be overridden and rejected altogether. It is a freakish fact of our
+      composition that these most intense feelings in life are just those that
+      are most rapidly and completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years,
+      but the magic of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our
+      lives and vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was
+      still not a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs.
+      Skelmersdale, and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a
+      swine in its sty....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at last he could
+      sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the project that
+      had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had discovered a new reason for travelling. The last country we can see
+      clearly, he had discovered, is our own country. It is as hard to see one's
+      own country as it is to see the back of one's head. It is too much behind
+      us, too much ourselves. But Russia is like England with everything larger,
+      more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked about St.
+      Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage untamed London
+      on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal cities, like no other
+      capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings mingled in their effects.
+      Like London it looked over the heads of its own people to a limitless
+      polyglot empire. And Russia was an aristocratic land, with a middle-class
+      that had no pride in itself as a class; it had a British toughness and
+      incompetence, a British disregard of logic and meticulous care. Russia,
+      like England, was outside Catholic Christendom, it had a state church and
+      the opposition to that church was not secularism but dissent. One could
+      draw a score of such contrasted parallels. And now it was in a state of
+      intolerable stress, that laid bare the elemental facts of a great social
+      organization. It was having its South African war, its war at the other
+      end of the earth, with a certain defeat instead of a dubious victory....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in
+      England,&rdquo; said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham went on with his discourse about Russia....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the college of Troitzka,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;which I understand is a kind
+      of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me that
+      although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the
+      arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are
+      conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation. He
+      led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try to
+      grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty of
+      every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much. And so he was
+      going, and if Prothero cared to come too&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;I should like to go to Russia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      13
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was never able
+      to lift Prothero away from his obsession. It was the substance of their
+      talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting destroyers and winking
+      beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the smoothly undulating darkness
+      of the North Sea; it rose upon them again as they sat over the cakes and
+      cheese of a Dutch breakfast in the express for Berlin. Prothero filled the
+      Sieges Allee with his complaints against nature and society, and
+      distracted Benham in his contemplation of Polish agriculture from the
+      windows of the train with turgid sexual liberalism. So that Benham, during
+      this period until Prothero left him and until the tragic enormous
+      spectacle of Russia in revolution took complete possession of him, was as
+      it were thinking upon two floors. Upon the one he was thinking of the vast
+      problems of a society of a hundred million people staggering on the verge
+      of anarchy, and upon the other he was perplexed by the feverish
+      inattention of Prothero to the tremendous things that were going on all
+      about them. It was only presently when the serenity of his own private
+      life began to be ruffled by disillusionment, that he began to realize the
+      intimate connexion of these two systems of thought. Yet Prothero put it to
+      him plainly enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Inattentive,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;of course I am inattentive. What is really
+      the matter with all this&mdash;this social mess people are in here, is
+      that nearly everybody is inattentive. These Big Things of yours, nobody is
+      thinking of them really. Everybody is thinking about the Near Things that
+      concern himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The bombs they threw yesterday? The Cossacks and the whips?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nudges. Gestures of inattention. If everybody was thinking of the Res
+      Publica would there be any need for bombs?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pursued his advantage. &ldquo;It's all nonsense to suppose people think of
+      politics because they are in 'em. As well suppose that the passengers on a
+      liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war. Before men can think of
+      to-morrow, they must think of to-day. Before they can think of others,
+      they must be sure about themselves. First of all, food; the private, the
+      personal economic worry. Am I safe for food? Then sex, and until one is
+      tranquil and not ashamed, not irritated and dissatisfied, how can one care
+      for other people, or for next year or the Order of the World? How can one,
+      Benham?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized the illustration at hand. &ldquo;Here we are in Warsaw&mdash;not a
+      month after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging. Windows have still to be
+      mended, smashed doors restored. There's blood-stains still on some of the
+      houses. There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and in the Ochrana
+      prison. This morning there were executions. Is it anything more than an
+      eddy in the real life of the place? Watch the customers in the shops, the
+      crowd in the streets, the men in the cafes who stare at the passing women.
+      They are all swallowed up again in their own business. They just looked up
+      as the Cossacks galloped past; they just shifted a bit when the bullets
+      spat....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing
+      adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide of the
+      private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him back to
+      Cambridge&mdash;changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
+      disregard Prothero. He was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble of
+      Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the hurrying
+      darknesses of an approaching storm. In those days it looked as though it
+      must be an overwhelming storm. He was drinking in the wide and massive
+      Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the entangling streets, the houses
+      with their strange lettering in black and gold, the innumerable barbaric
+      churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the sombre red fortress of the
+      Kremlin, with its bulbous churches clustering up into the sky, the
+      crosses, the innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil,
+      carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of permissible caricature, and
+      in this setting the obscure drama of clustering, staring, sash-wearing
+      peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand varieties of
+      uniform, a running and galloping to and fro of messengers, a flutter of
+      little papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and portentous, a
+      gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on to a perpetual
+      clash and clamour of bells. Benham had brought letters of introduction to
+      a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed. They were &ldquo;away,&rdquo; the
+      porters said, and they continued to be &ldquo;away,&rdquo;&mdash;it was the formula,
+      he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few showed themselves
+      extraordinarily anxious to inform him about things, to explain themselves
+      and things about them exhaustively. One young student took him to various
+      meetings and showed him in great detail the scene of the recent murder of
+      the Grand Duke Sergius. The buildings opposite the old French cannons were
+      still under repair. &ldquo;The assassin stood just here. The bomb fell there,
+      look! right down there towards the gate; that was where they found his
+      arm. He was torn to fragments. He was scraped up. He was mixed with the
+      horses....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter of
+      days or at the utmost weeks. And whatever question Benham chose to ask
+      these talkers were prepared to answer. Except one. &ldquo;And after the
+      revolution,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;what then?...&rdquo; Then they waved their hands, and
+      failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous drift
+      towards a conflict. He was trying to piece together a process, if it was
+      one and the same process, which involved riots in Lodz, fighting at Libau,
+      wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal battlings in Manchuria, the
+      obscure movements of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in the Indian
+      seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was trying to rationalize it all
+      in his mind, to comprehend its direction. He was struggling strenuously
+      with the obscurities of the language in which these things were being
+      discussed about him, a most difficult language demanding new sets of
+      visual images because of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder that for a
+      time he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some entirely
+      disconnected affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre Square.
+      Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-looking men with
+      peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's friends and guides to
+      take him out and show him this and that. At first Prothero always
+      accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then he began to make excuses. He
+      would stay behind in the hotel. Then when Benham returned Prothero would
+      have disappeared. When the porter was questioned about Prothero his
+      nescience was profound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who wanted
+      to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was alarmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Moscow is a late place,&rdquo; said Benham's student friend. &ldquo;You need not be
+      anxious until after four or five in the morning. It will be quite time&mdash;QUITE
+      time to be anxious to-morrow. He may be&mdash;close at hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him
+      sleepy and irritable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't trouble if YOU are late,&rdquo; said Prothero, sitting up in his bed
+      with a red resentful face and crumpled hair. &ldquo;I wasn't born yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to leave Moscow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Odessa&mdash;Odessa is the centre of interest just now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to stay in Moscow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham looked baffled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon them.
+      &ldquo;I don't want to leave Moscow,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I'm not going to do so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But haven't we done&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero interrupted. &ldquo;You may. But I haven't. We're not after the same
+      things. Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest me. I've found&mdash;different
+      things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His expression was extraordinarily defiant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;to put our affairs on a different footing. Now
+      you've opened the matter we may as well go into it. You were good enough
+      to bring me here.... There was a sort of understanding we were working
+      together.... We aren't.... The long and short of it is, Benham, I want to
+      pay you for my journey here and go on my own&mdash;independently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly
+      incredible in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters
+      jerked back into Benham's memory. It popped back so suddenly that for an
+      instant he wanted to laugh. He turned towards the window, picked his way
+      among Prothero's carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment
+      staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing
+      fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS. Then he
+      turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;didn't I see you the other evening driving towards the
+      Hermitage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Prothero, and added, &ldquo;that's it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were with a lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she IS a lady,&rdquo; said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face twitched
+      as though he was going to weep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a Russian?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She had an English mother. Oh, you needn't stand there and look so damned
+      ironical! She's&mdash;she's a woman. She's a thing of kindness....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was too full to go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy, old boy,&rdquo; said Benham, distressed, &ldquo;I don't want to be ironical&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero had got his voice again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd better know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you'd better know. She's one of those women
+      who live in this hotel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Live in this hotel!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the fourth floor. Didn't you know? It's the way in most of these big
+      Russian hotels. They come down and sit about after lunch and dinner. A
+      woman with a yellow ticket. Oh! I don't care. I don't care a rap. She's
+      been kind to me; she's&mdash;she's dear to me. How are you to understand?
+      I shall stop in Moscow. I shall take her to England. I can't live without
+      her, Benham. And then&mdash; And then you come worrying me to come to your
+      damned Odessa!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face as
+      though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an apoplectic
+      moment burst noisily into tears. They ran between his fingers. &ldquo;Get out of
+      my room,&rdquo; he shouted, suffocatingly. &ldquo;What business have you to come
+      prying on me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared round-eyed
+      at his friend. His hands were in his pockets. For a time he said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he began at last, and stopped again. &ldquo;Billy, in this country
+      somehow one wants to talk like a Russian. Billy, my dear&mdash;I'm not
+      your father, I'm not your judge. I'm&mdash;unreasonably fond of you. It's
+      not my business to settle what is right or wrong for you. If you want to
+      stay in Moscow, stay in Moscow. Stay here, and stay as my guest....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know,&rdquo; said Prothero brokenly; &ldquo;I didn't know it was possible to
+      get so fond of a person....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
+      abominable in his life before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I'll make things all right here before
+      I go....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound thought to
+      his own room....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to explain
+      what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about the room trying
+      ways of putting it, while Benham packed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to have
+      shrunken to something sleek and small.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you could stay for a later train and have lunch and
+      meet her. She's not the ordinary thing. She's&mdash;different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;no woman IS the
+      ordinary thing. They are all&mdash;different....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      14
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as disconnected
+      from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any matter to be. While
+      Benham went from Moscow and returned, and travelled hither and thither,
+      and involved himself more and more in the endless tangled threads of the
+      revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero was lost to all those large
+      issues in the development of his personal situation. He contributed
+      nothing to Benham's thought except attempts at discouragement. He
+      reiterated his declaration that all the vast stress and change of Russian
+      national life was going on because it was universally disregarded. &ldquo;I tell
+      you, as I told you before, that nobody is attending. You think because all
+      Moscow, all Russia, is in the picture, that everybody is concerned. Nobody
+      is concerned. Nobody cares what is happening. Even the men who write in
+      newspapers and talk at meetings about it don't care. They are thinking of
+      their dinners, of their clothes, of their money, of their wives. They
+      hurry home....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was his excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Manifestly it was an excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy and
+      divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible. To Benham
+      in those days everything was very simple in this business of love. The
+      aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all. He had to love Amanda. He
+      and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in love, he felt, than
+      they had ever been before. They were now writing love-letters to each
+      other and enjoying a separation that was almost voluptuous. She found in
+      the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to him and to the natural fate
+      of women, a delightful exercise for her very considerable powers of
+      expression. Life pointed now wonderfully to the great time ahead when
+      there would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and meanwhile the Cheetah loped
+      about the wild world upon a mighty quest. In such terms she put it. Such
+      foolishness written in her invincibly square and youthful hand went daily
+      from London to Russia, and stacked up against his return in the porter's
+      office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or pursued him down through the jarring
+      disorders of south-west Russia, or waited for him at ill-chosen
+      post-offices that deflected his journeyings wastefully or in several
+      instances went altogether astray. Perhaps they supplied self-educating
+      young strikers in the postal service with useful exercises in the
+      deciphering of manuscript English. He wrote back five hundred different
+      ways of saying that he loved her extravagantly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and
+      solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world;
+      Heroic Love to its highest note&mdash;and then you go about your business.
+      It seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin high and diffuse
+      a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate multitudes who stewed in
+      affliction and hate because they had failed as yet to find this simple,
+      culminating elucidation. And Prothero&mdash;Prothero, too, was now
+      achieving the same grand elementariness, out of his lusts and protests and
+      general physical squalor he had flowered into love. For a time it is true
+      it made rather an ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere
+      goose-stepping for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay
+      exaltation. Benham had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this
+      Anglo-Russian, who was a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had
+      seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him,
+      and his impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with dusky
+      hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her, a quiet
+      alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda. And if she liked
+      old Prothero&mdash; And, indeed, she must like old Prothero or could she
+      possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero's soul would
+      wake up and face the world again. What did it matter what she had been?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained anxiety and
+      the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering towards revolution,
+      Benham went with his own love like a lamp within him and this affair of
+      Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was quite prepared for the most
+      sympathetic and liberal behaviour when he came back to Moscow to make the
+      lady's acquaintance. He intended to help Prothero to marry and take her
+      back to Cambridge, and to assist by every possible means in destroying and
+      forgetting the official yellow ticket that defined her status in Moscow.
+      But he reckoned without either Prothero or the young lady in this
+      expectation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations that there
+      were obscure obstacles to this manifest course. Prothero hesitated; the
+      lady expressed doubts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished. It was
+      chiefly a similarity of complexion. She had a more delicate face than
+      Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none of Amanda's
+      glow, and she spoke her mother's language with a pretty halting limp that
+      was very different from Amanda's clear decisions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her case compactly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would not DO in Cambridge,&rdquo; she said with an infinitesimal glance at
+      Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Benham,&rdquo; she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman of
+      affairs, &ldquo;now do you see me in Cambridge? Now do you see me? Kept outside
+      the walls? In a little DATCHA? With no occupation? Just to amuse him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved still
+      completer lucidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would come if I thought he wanted me to come,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But you see
+      if I came he would not want me to come. Because then he would have me and
+      so he wouldn't want me. He would just have the trouble. And I am not sure
+      if I should be happy in Cambridge. I am not sure I should be happy enough
+      to make him happy. It is a very learned and intelligent and charming
+      society, of course; but here, THINGS HAPPEN. At Cambridge nothing happens&mdash;there
+      is only education. There is no revolution in Cambridge; there are not even
+      sinful people to be sorry for.... And he says himself that Cambridge
+      people are particular. He says they are liberal but very, very particular,
+      and perhaps I could not always act my part well. Sometimes I am not always
+      well behaved. When there is music I behave badly sometimes, or when I am
+      bored. He says the Cambridge people are so liberal that they do not mind
+      what you are, but he says they are so particular that they mind dreadfully
+      how you are what you are.... So that it comes to exactly the same
+      thing....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anna Alexievna,&rdquo; said Benham suddenly, &ldquo;are you in love with Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her manner became conscientiously scientific.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is very kind and very generous&mdash;too generous. He keeps sending
+      for more money&mdash;hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you EVER in love?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. But it's all gone long ago. It was like being hungry. Only
+      very fine hungry. Exquisite hungry.... And then being disgusted....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is in love with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is love?&rdquo; said Anna. &ldquo;He is grateful. He is by nature grateful.&rdquo; She
+      smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who looks down on her
+      bambino.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you love nothing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love Russia&mdash;and being alone, being completely alone. When I am
+      dead perhaps I shall be alone. Not even my own body will touch me then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she added, &ldquo;But I shall be sorry when he goes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone. &ldquo;Your Anna,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is
+      rather wonderful. At first, I tell you now frankly I did not like her very
+      much, I thought she looked 'used,' she drank vodka at lunch, she was gay,
+      uneasily; she seemed a sham thing. All that was prejudice. She thinks;
+      she's generous, she's fine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's tragic,&rdquo; said Prothero as though it was the same thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke as though he noted an objection. His next remark confirmed this
+      impression. &ldquo;That's why I can't take her back to Cambridge,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, Benham,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;she's human. She's not really feminine. I
+      mean, she's&mdash;unsexed. She isn't fitted to be a wife or a mother any
+      more. We've talked about the possible life in England, very plainly. I've
+      explained what a household in Cambridge would mean.... It doesn't attract
+      her.... In a way she's been let out from womanhood, forced out of
+      womanhood, and I see now that when women are let out from womanhood
+      there's no putting them back. I could give a lecture on Anna. I see now
+      that if women are going to be wives and mothers and homekeepers and
+      ladies, they must be got ready for it from the beginning, sheltered, never
+      really let out into the wild chances of life. She has been. Bitterly.
+      She's REALLY emancipated. And it's let her out into a sort of nothingness.
+      She's no longer a woman, and she isn't a man. She ought to be able to go
+      on her own&mdash;like a man. But I can't take her back to Cambridge. Even
+      for her sake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't be happy in Cambridge&mdash;alone,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, damnably not! But what can I do? I had at first some idea of coming
+      to Moscow for good&mdash;teaching.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused. &ldquo;Impossible. I'm worth nothing here. I couldn't have kept her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what are you going to do, Billy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't KNOW what I'm going to do, I tell you. I live for the moment.
+      To-morrow we are going out into the country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand,&rdquo; said Benham with a gesture of resignation. &ldquo;It seems
+      to me that if a man and woman love each other&mdash;well, they insist upon
+      each other. What is to happen to her if you leave her in Moscow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damnation! Is there any need to ask that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take her to Cambridge, man. And if Cambridge objects, teach Cambridge
+      better manners.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero's face was suddenly transfigured with rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you she won't come!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy!&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;you should make her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't love her like that,&rdquo; said Prothero, shrill with anger. &ldquo;I
+      tell you I don't love her like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he lunged into further deeps. &ldquo;It's the other men,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it's
+      the things that have been. Don't you understand? Can't you understand? The
+      memories&mdash;she must have memories&mdash;they come between us. It's
+      something deeper than reason. It's in one's spine and under one's nails.
+      One could do anything, I perceive, for one's very own woman....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How could any man make her
+      his very own woman now? You&mdash;you don't seem to understand&mdash;ANYTHING.
+      She's nobody's woman&mdash;for ever. That&mdash;that might-have-been has
+      gone for ever.... It's nerves&mdash;a passion of the nerves. There's a
+      cruelty in life and&mdash; She's KIND to me. She's so kind to me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      15
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken fragments
+      in letters. When he looked for Anna Alexievna in December&mdash;he never
+      learnt her surname&mdash;he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar soon
+      after Prothero's departure and he could not find whither she had gone. He
+      never found her again. Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion. But
+      Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock to
+      Benham's ideas. It was clear he went off almost callously; it would seem
+      there was very little crying. Towards the end it was evident that the two
+      had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very end of all. It was almost
+      as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go. Then came regret,
+      a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with every mile of
+      distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero. He had some hours
+      there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy
+      with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious
+      secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant
+      resemblance to Anna....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back.
+      &ldquo;But now I had the damned frontier,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;between us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the
+      &ldquo;damned frontier&rdquo; tip the balance against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it seemed
+      as if Prothero had been transfigured. &ldquo;I can't stand this business,&rdquo; he
+      wrote. &ldquo;It has things in it, possibilities of emotional disturbance&mdash;you
+      can have no idea! In the train&mdash;luckily I was alone in the
+      compartment&mdash;I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it, I
+      was weeping&mdash;noisy weeping, an uproar! A beastly German came and
+      stood in the corridor to stare. I had to get out of the train. It is
+      disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you
+      about my dismal feelings....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but
+      to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable
+      regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of
+      his friend. Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;A levity. I
+      suspect the gypsum in the subsoil&mdash;some as yet undescribed
+      radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of those
+      tear-compelling German emanations....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, Benham, I have found a friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A woman. Of course you will laugh, you will sneer. You do not understand
+      these things.... Yet they are so simple. It was the strangest accident
+      brought us together. There was something that drew us together. A sort of
+      instinct. Near the Boulevard Poissoniere....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens!&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;A sort of instinct!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told her all about Anna!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Lord!&rdquo; cried Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She understood. Perfectly. None of your so-called 'respectable' women
+      could have understood.... At first I intended merely to talk to her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Little Anna Alexievna!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you were too clean for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      16
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel
+      meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief,
+      to the grey mildness of Trinity. He saw him, capped and gowned, and
+      restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming
+      friendships.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts
+      and restrained celibates at the high tables. They ate on in their mature
+      wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled. Presently they would
+      withdraw processionally to the combination room....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There would be much to talk about over the wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space of
+      years. There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost in the
+      heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office. Perhaps to this day
+      they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in Kishinev or
+      Ekaterinoslav....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      17
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In November, after an adventure in the trader's quarter of Kieff which had
+      brought him within an inch of death, and because an emotional wave had
+      swept across him and across his correspondence with Amanda, Benham went
+      back suddenly to England and her. He wanted very greatly to see her and
+      also he wanted to make certain arrangements about his property. He
+      returned by way of Hungary, and sent telegrams like shouts of excitement
+      whenever the train stopped for a sufficient time. &ldquo;Old Leopard, I am
+      coming, I am coming,&rdquo; he telegraphed, announcing his coming for the fourth
+      time. It was to be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the mutual
+      refreshment of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to Russia
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the utmost
+      dignity of expectant maternity. Like many other people he had been a
+      little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a common human
+      experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a rare and sacramental
+      function. Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey, dove-like
+      tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had given way to a soft glow of
+      the utmost loveliness, her brisk little neck that had always reminded him
+      of the stalk of a flower was now softened and rounded; her eyes were
+      tender, and she moved about the place in the manner of one who is vowed to
+      a great sacrifice. She dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a
+      certain astonishment in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony,
+      was the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her
+      daughter-in-law's unparalleled immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was
+      everywhere, and at his bedside he found&mdash;it had been put there for
+      him by Amanda&mdash;among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that
+      most wonderful of all philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the impending
+      fact. An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in
+      the depths of London society, but to make up for his absence Mrs. Morris
+      had taken a little cottage down by the river and the Wilder girls were
+      with her, both afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it seemed,
+      and more particularly Betty, prepared to be keenly critical of Benham's
+      attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had returned
+      in a rather different vein of exaltation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments an
+      effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed. It was as if she
+      put aside for him something official, something sincerely maintained,
+      necessary, but at times a little irksome. It was as if she was glad to
+      take him into her confidence and unbend. Within the pre-natal Amanda an
+      impish Amanda still lingered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must never
+      know....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most unpontifical
+      moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him home
+      across Europe. At times she was extraordinarily jolly. They had two or
+      three happy walks about the Chexington woods; that year the golden weather
+      of October had flowed over into November, and except for a carpet of green
+      and gold under the horse-chestnuts most of the leaves were still on the
+      trees. Gleams of her old wanton humour shone on him. And then would come
+      something else, something like a shadow across the world, something he had
+      quite forgotten since his idea of heroic love had flooded him, something
+      that reminded him of those long explanations with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders
+      that had never been explained, and of the curate in the doorway of the
+      cottage and his unaccountable tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little surprised to
+      find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into the garden, with an
+      accustomed familiarity. Sir Philip perceived him with a start that was
+      instantly controlled, and greeted him with unnatural ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket in the
+      neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending the summer,
+      the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from scholars and literary
+      men. A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought to have been aviating or
+      travelling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that there
+      was a flavour of established association in their manner. But then Sir
+      Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne. She called him &ldquo;Pip,&rdquo;
+       and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-court to him, &ldquo;Pip!&rdquo; And
+      then he called her &ldquo;Amanda.&rdquo; When the Wilder girls came up to join the
+      tennis he was just as brotherly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day he came to lunch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been before of
+      the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes. They watched
+      him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that seemed at once pained
+      and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind of hard
+      brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably suspended,
+      that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon Sir Philip
+      would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up and go away
+      in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he could be spoken
+      to he contrived to speak to Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took advantage of
+      a pause to commit his little indiscretion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Benham,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;looks amazingly well&mdash;extraordinarily well,
+      don't you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Benham, startled. &ldquo;Yes. She certainly keeps very well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She misses you terribly,&rdquo; said Sir Philip; &ldquo;it is a time when a woman
+      misses her husband. But, of course, she does not want to hamper your
+      work....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest in
+      these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no better
+      expression for this than a grunt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't mind,&rdquo; said the young man with a slight catch in the breath
+      that might have been apprehensive, &ldquo;that I sometimes bring her books and
+      flowers and things? Do what little I can to keep life interesting down
+      here? It's not very congenial.... She's so wonderful&mdash;I think she is
+      the most wonderful woman in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was really
+      a primitive barbarian in these matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've no doubt,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that my wife has every reason to be grateful
+      for your attentions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir Philip was
+      engendering something still more personal. If so, he might be constrained
+      to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of chrysanthemums over Sir
+      Philip's head, or kick him in an improving manner. He had a ridiculous
+      belief that Sir Philip would probably take anything of the sort very
+      touchingly. He scrambled in his mind for some remark that would avert this
+      possibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you ever been in Russia?&rdquo; he asked hastily. &ldquo;It is the most
+      wonderful country in Europe. I had an odd adventure near Kiev. During a
+      pogrom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were presently
+      thrown out by Lady Marayne. They were so much more in the air....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      18
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had foreseen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Easton has gone away,&rdquo; he remarked three days later to Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told him to go. He is a bore with you about. But otherwise he is rather
+      a comfort, Cheetah.&rdquo; She meditated upon Sir Philip. &ldquo;And he's an
+      HONOURABLE man,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He's safe....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      19
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in earnest.
+      The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic love for the modern
+      aristocrat ended abruptly. Instead there came the first draft for a study
+      of jealousy. The note was written in pencil on Chexington notepaper and
+      manifestly that had been supported on the ribbed cover of a book. There
+      was a little computation in the corner, converting forty-five degrees
+      Reaumur into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White guess it had been
+      written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it had been written in a rather
+      amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's journey to the gathering
+      revolt in Moscow....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual
+      jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible,
+      something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort to
+      be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so easily
+      settled with....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One likes to know.... Possibly one wants to know too much.... In phases
+      of fatigue, and particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one is
+      leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an irrational
+      torment....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of this
+      base motive. I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how strongly
+      jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with a man....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human being
+      being one's ownest own&mdash;utterly one's own....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One does....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is something dishonouring in distrust&mdash;to both the distrusted
+      and the one who distrusts....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      20
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham did not see Amanda again until after the birth of their child. He
+      spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the fitful fighting
+      and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and taking care of a lost
+      and helpless English family whose father had gone astray temporarily on
+      the way home from Baku. Then he went southward to Rostov and thence to
+      Astrakhan. Here he really began his travels. He determined to get to India
+      by way of Herat and for the first time in his life rode out into an
+      altogether lawless wilderness. He went on obstinately because he found
+      himself disposed to funk the journey, and because discouragements were put
+      in his way. He was soon quite cut off from all the ways of living he had
+      known. He learnt what it is to be flea-bitten, saddle-sore, hungry and,
+      above all, thirsty. He was haunted by a dread of fever, and so contrived
+      strange torments for himself with overdoses of quinine. He ceased to be
+      traceable from Chexington in March, and he reappeared in the form of a
+      telegram from Karachi demanding news in May. He learnt he was the father
+      of a man-child and that all was well with Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not expected to be so long away from any communication with the
+      outer world, and something in the nature of a stricken conscience took him
+      back to England. He found a second William Porphyry in the world,
+      dominating Chexington, and Amanda tenderly triumphant and passionate, the
+      Madonna enthroned. For William Porphyry he could feel no emotion. William
+      Porphyry was very red and ugly and protesting, feeble and aggressive, a
+      matter for a skilled nurse. To see him was to ignore him and dispel a
+      dream. It was to Amanda Benham turned again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some days he was content to adore his Madonna and listen to the
+      familiar flatteries of her love. He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda said,
+      and wiser, so that she was afraid of him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he became aware that she was requiring him to stay at her side.
+      &ldquo;We have both had our adventures,&rdquo; she said, which struck him as an odd
+      phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those conceptions
+      of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so clearly
+      understood between them had vanished from her mind. She had absolutely
+      forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had seemed to him the
+      crowning instant, the real marriage of their lives. It had gone, it had
+      left no recoverable trace in her. And upon his interpretations of that he
+      had loved her passionately for a year. She was back at exactly the ideas
+      and intentions that ruled her during their first settlement in London. She
+      wanted a joint life in the social world of London, she demanded his
+      presence, his attention, the daily practical evidences of love. It was all
+      very well for him to be away when the child was coming, but now everything
+      was different. Now he must stay by her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time he argued no case. These issues he had settled for ever. Even an
+      indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation that began with
+      appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him. Behind these things now was
+      India. The huge problems of India had laid an unshakeable hold upon his
+      imagination. He had seen Russia, and he wanted to balance that picture by
+      a vision of the east....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington. The young man
+      displayed no further disposition to be confidentially sentimental. But he
+      seemed to have something on his mind. And Amanda said not a word about
+      him. He was a young man above suspicion, Benham felt....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these two
+      larger carnivores began to change. Except for the repetition of accustomed
+      endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense of the word. They
+      dealt chiefly with the &ldquo;Cub,&rdquo; and even there Benham felt presently that
+      the enthusiasm diminished. A new amazing quality for Amanda appeared&mdash;triteness.
+      The very writing of her letters changed as though it had suddenly lost
+      backbone. Her habitual liveliness of phrasing lost its point. Had she lost
+      her animation? Was she ill unknowingly? Where had the light gone? It was
+      as if her attention was distracted.... As if every day when she wrote her
+      mind was busy about something else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Abruptly at last he understood. A fact that had never been stated, never
+      formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to
+      convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question
+      perceived to be THERE....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He left a record of that moment of realization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had never
+      seen Amanda before. Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with that same
+      dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a pitiless, a scientific
+      distinctness that has neither light nor shadow....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; I said, and then presently I got up very softly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin. I wanted to
+      feel the largeness of the sky. I went out upon the deck. We were off the
+      coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment, there comes back to me
+      also the faint flavour of spice in the air, the low line of the coast, the
+      cool flooding abundance of the Indian moonlight, the swish of the black
+      water against the side of the ship. And a perception of infinite loss, as
+      if the limitless heavens above this earth and below to the very uttermost
+      star were just one boundless cavity from which delight had fled....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I had lost her. I knew it with absolute certainty. I knew it
+      from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her needs. I knew it
+      from every line she had written me in the last three months. I knew it
+      intuitively. She had been unfaithful. She must have been unfaithful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      21
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters. Let me be at
+      least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I may have been led
+      into by force of my passions. Always I have despised jealousy....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the aristocratic life
+      to be achieved. They come in a certain order, and in that order the spirit
+      of man is armed against them less and less efficiently. Of fear and my
+      struggle against fear I have told already. I am fearful. I am a physical
+      coward until I can bring shame and anger to my assistance, but in
+      overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole body of human tradition.
+      Every one, the basest creatures, every Hottentot, every stunted creature
+      that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the instinctive
+      constitution of man is at fault here and that fear is shameful and must be
+      subdued. The race is on one's side. And so there is a vast traditional
+      support for a man against the Second Limitation, the limitation of
+      physical indulgence. It is not so universal as the first, there is a
+      grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness, but common pride is
+      against it. And in this matter my temperament has been my help: I am
+      fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil from
+      excess. It is no great virtue; it happens so; it is something in the
+      nerves of my skin. I cannot endure myself unshaven or in any way unclean;
+      I am tormented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories, and after
+      I had once loved Amanda I could not&mdash;unless some irrational impulse
+      to get equal with her had caught me&mdash;have broken my faith to her,
+      whatever breach there was in her faith to me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more easily
+      clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that distinctive
+      virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment and anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I despised a jealous man. There is a traditional discredit of jealousy,
+      not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very strong. But the
+      general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with the supposition
+      that there is no cause for jealousy, that it is unreasonable suspicion.
+      Given a cause then tradition speaks with an uncertain voice....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was
+      impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable to
+      imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as
+      fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my
+      image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that she
+      was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently,
+      gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a pool, that
+      knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated up into my
+      consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me! Outrageously. Abominably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this
+      question. My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right whatever
+      to her love or loyalty. I must have that very clear....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except accidentally
+      here and there, incompatible with the domestic life. It means going hither
+      and thither in the universe of thought as much as in the universe of
+      matter, it means adventure, it means movement and adventure that must
+      needs be hopelessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it means
+      self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit into the welfare of a
+      family. In all ages, directly society had risen above the level of a
+      barbaric tribal village, this need of a release from the family for
+      certain necessary types of people has been recognized. It was met
+      sometimes informally, sometimes formally, by the growth and establishment
+      of special classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of pledged
+      knights, of a great variety of non-family people, whose concern was the
+      larger collective life that opens out beyond the simple necessities and
+      duties and loyalties of the steading and of the craftsman's house.
+      Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form of celibacy; but
+      besides that there have been a hundred institutional variations of the
+      common life to meet the need of the special man, the man who must go deep
+      and the man who must go far. A vowed celibacy ceased to be a tolerable
+      rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic idea entered the mind of man,
+      because a celibate aristocracy means the abandonment of the racial future
+      to a proletariat of base unleaderly men. That was plain to Plato. It was
+      plain to Campanelea. It was plain to the Protestant reformers. But the
+      world has never yet gone on to the next step beyond that recognition, to
+      the recognition of feminine aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers,
+      as untrammelled by domestic servitudes and family relationships as the men
+      of their kind. That I see has always been my idea since in my
+      undergraduate days I came under the spell of Plato. It was a matter of
+      course that my first gift to Amanda should be his REPUBLIC. I loved Amanda
+      transfigured in that dream....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are no such women....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with myself. I
+      had no sound reason for supposing that. I did suppose that. I did not
+      perceive that not only was she younger than myself, but that while I had
+      been going through a mill of steely education, kept close, severely
+      exercised, polished by discussion, she had but the weak training of a not
+      very good school, some scrappy reading, the vague discussions of village
+      artists, and the draped and decorated novelties of the 'advanced.' It all
+      went to nothing on the impact of the world.... She showed herself the
+      woman the world has always known, no miracle, and the alternative was for
+      me to give myself to her in the ancient way, to serve her happiness, to
+      control her and delight and companion her, or to let her go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm and
+      her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home. She demands the
+      concentration of a man. Not to be able to command that is her failure. Not
+      to give her that is to shame her. As I had shamed Amanda....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      22
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are no such women.&rdquo; He had written this in and struck it out, and
+      then at some later time written it in again. There it stayed now as his
+      last persuasion, but it set White thinking and doubting. And, indeed,
+      there was another sheet of pencilled broken stuff that seemed to glance at
+      quite another type of womanhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      23
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the remaking of
+      the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as great as those
+      from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes. These women must become
+      aristocratic through their own innate impulse, they must be self-called to
+      their lives, exactly as men must be; there is no making an aristocrat
+      without a predisposition for rule and nobility. And they have to discover
+      and struggle against just exactly the limitations that we have to struggle
+      against. They have to conquer not only fear but indulgence, indulgence of
+      a softer, more insidious quality, and jealousy&mdash;proprietorship....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand times in
+      my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and desired a mate.
+      A mate&mdash;not a possession. It is a need almost naively simple. If only
+      one could have a woman who thought of one and with one! Though she were on
+      the other side of the world and busied about a thousand things....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'WITH one,' I see it must be rather than 'OF one.' That 'of one' is just
+      the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man is a mating creature. It is not good to be alone. But mating means a
+      mate....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers. 'Dancing
+      attendance'&mdash;as they used to say. We should meet upon our ways as the
+      great carnivores do....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That at any rate was a sound idea. Though we only played with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible
+      satisfaction now for me. What is the good of dreaming? Life and chance
+      have played a trick upon my body and soul. I am mated, though I am mated
+      to a phantom. I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton's Amanda, but Amanda
+      in armour, the Amanda of my dreams. Sense, and particularly the sense of
+      beauty, lies deeper than reason in us. There can be no mate for me now
+      unless she comes with Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and Amanda's quick
+      movements and her clever hands....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      24
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There were things between us two as lovers,&mdash;love, things more
+      beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind
+      hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression,
+      images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight
+      in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off wonderful
+      music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing softly, of
+      floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and sudden as
+      the knife of an assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears, tears that
+      are happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations, gratitudes,
+      sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft eyelid closed in
+      sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard unexpectedly; sweet,
+      dear magical things that I can find no words for....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that she was
+      not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that has been
+      between us more cheaply than I did? It does not change one jot of it for
+      me. At the time she did not hold it cheaply. She forgets where I do not
+      forget....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      25
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda and
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not at once turn homeward. It was in Ceylon that he dropped his
+      work and came home. At Colombo he found a heap of letters awaiting him,
+      and there were two of these that had started at the same time. They had
+      been posted in London on one eventful afternoon. Lady Marayne and Amanda
+      had quarrelled violently. Two earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women,
+      full of neat but belated repartee, separated to write their simultaneous
+      letters. Each letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.
+      Lady Marayne told her story ruthlessly. Amanda, on the other hand,
+      generalized, and explained. Sir Philip's adoration of her was a
+      love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure. Was there no trust nor
+      courage in the world? She would defy all jealous scandal. She would not
+      even banish him from her side. Surely the Cheetah could trust her. But the
+      pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond Amanda's explaining. The little
+      lady's dignity had been stricken. &ldquo;I have been used as a cloak,&rdquo; she
+      wrote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her phrases were vivid. She quoted the very words of Amanda, words she had
+      overheard at Chexington in the twilight. They were no invention. They were
+      the very essence of Amanda, the lover. It was as sure as if Benham had
+      heard the sound of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen, as if she had
+      crept by him, stooping and rustling softly. It brought back the living
+      sense of her, excited, flushed, reckless; his wild-haired Amanda of
+      infinite delight.... All day those words of hers pursued him. All night
+      they flared across the black universe. He buried his face in the pillows
+      and they whispered softly in his ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the stirring
+      quiet of the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sent no notice of his coming back. Nor did he come back with a definite
+      plan. But he wanted to get at Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      26
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with Amanda he had to reckon. Towards Easton he felt scarcely any
+      anger at all. Easton he felt only existed for him because Amanda willed to
+      have it so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger. His
+      devotion filled Benham with scorn. His determination to serve Amanda at
+      any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights for her, his
+      humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her moods and
+      happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility. That rage
+      against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist against a blackleg.
+      Are all the women to fall to the men who will be their master-slaves and
+      keepers? But it was not simply that Benham felt men must be freed from
+      this incessant attendance; women too must free themselves from their
+      almost instinctive demand for an attendant....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings. Never in
+      his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and won
+      and competed for and fought over. So that it was Amanda he wanted to reach
+      and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses only to
+      fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and jealous fury. But the
+      forces that were driving him home now were the forces below the level of
+      reason and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and desire, profound
+      aboriginal urgencies. He thought, indeed, very little as he lay in his
+      berth or sulked on deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless invasion of
+      exasperating images that ever and again would so wring him that his
+      muscles would tighten and his hands clench or he would find himself
+      restraining a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole world.
+      She filled the skies. She bent over him and mocked him. She became a
+      mystery of passion and dark beauty. She was the sin of the world. One
+      breathed her in the winds of the sea. She had taken to herself the
+      greatness of elemental things....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see that she
+      was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather tired and very
+      frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an evening-dress of
+      unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of gold and colour about
+      her wrists and neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him
+      homeward. He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has
+      greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to kill
+      than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      27
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took them by surprise. It had been his intention to take them by
+      surprise. Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near Charing
+      Cross. In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in Lancaster
+      Gate. The butler was deferentially amazed. Mrs. Benham was, he said, at a
+      theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought some other people also. He
+      did not know when she would be back. She might go on to supper. It was not
+      the custom for the servants to wait up for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham went into the study that reduplicated his former rooms in Finacue
+      Street and sat down before the fire the butler lit for him. He sent the
+      man to bed, and fell into profound meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was nearly two o'clock when he heard the sound of her latchkey and went
+      out at once upon the landing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The half-door stood open and Easton's car was outside. She stood in the
+      middle of the hall and relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he was
+      carrying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I am so tired.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My wonderful goddess,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, then started, stared, and
+      wrenched herself out of his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon them, white-faced
+      and inexpressive. Easton dropped back a pace. For a moment no one moved
+      nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton shut the half-door and shut out
+      the noises of the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some seconds Benham regarded them, and as he did so his spirit
+      changed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything he had thought of saying and doing vanished out of his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended the staircase. When he
+      was five or six steps above them, he spoke. &ldquo;Just sit down here,&rdquo; he said,
+      with a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself upon the stairs. &ldquo;DO sit
+      down,&rdquo; he said with a sudden testiness as they continued standing. &ldquo;I know
+      all about this affair. Do please sit down and let us talk.... Everybody's
+      gone to bed long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Why have you come back like this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you would sit down, Easton,&rdquo; he said in a voice of subdued
+      savagery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why have you come back?&rdquo; Sir Philip Easton found his voice to ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SIT down,&rdquo; Benham spat, and Easton obeyed unwillingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came back,&rdquo; Benham went on, &ldquo;to see to all this. Why else? I don't&mdash;now
+      I see you&mdash;feel very fierce about it. But it has distressed me. You
+      look changed, Amanda, and fagged. And your hair is untidy. It's as if
+      something had happened to you and made you a stranger.... You two people
+      are lovers. Very natural and simple, but I want to get out of it. Yes, I
+      want to get out of it. That wasn't quite my idea, but now I see it is.
+      It's queer, but on the whole I feel sorry for you. All of us, poor humans&mdash;.
+      There's reason to be sorry for all of us. We're full of lusts and
+      uneasiness and resentments that we haven't the will to control. What do
+      you two people want me to do to you? Would you like a divorce, Amanda?
+      It's the clean, straight thing, isn't it? Or would the scandal hurt you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give us a divorce,&rdquo; said Easton, looking to her to confirm him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want a divorce,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what do you want?&rdquo; asked Benham with sudden asperity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want a divorce,&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;Why do you, after a long silence,
+      come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the way it took me,&rdquo; said Benham, after a little interval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have left me for long months.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I was angry. And it was ridiculous to be angry. I thought I wanted
+      to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is to help you
+      out of this miserable mess&mdash;and then get away from you. You two would
+      like to marry. You ought to be married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would die to make Amanda happy,&rdquo; said Easton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make her happy. That you may
+      find more of a strain. Less tragic and more tiresome. I, on the other
+      hand, want neither to die nor live for her.&rdquo; Amanda moved sharply. &ldquo;It's
+      extraordinary what amazing vapours a lonely man may get into his head. If
+      you don't want a divorce then I suppose things might go on as they are
+      now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hate things as they are now,&rdquo; said Easton. &ldquo;I hate this falsehood and
+      deception.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would hate the scandal just as much,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would not care what the scandal was unless it hurt you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be only a temporary inconvenience,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Every one
+      would sympathize with you.... The whole thing is so natural.... People
+      would be glad to forget very soon. They did with my mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Amanda, &ldquo;it isn't so easy as that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to come to a decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pip,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I want to talk to&mdash;HIM&mdash;alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity. &ldquo;But why?&rdquo;
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is a thing for US.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pip, I want to talk to him alone. There is something&mdash;something I
+      can't say before you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I wait outside?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Pip. Go home. Yes,&mdash;there are some things you must leave to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the younger
+      man. The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to be at any cost
+      splendid. He felt&mdash;and it was a most unexpected and disconcerting
+      feeling&mdash;that he was no longer confederated with Amanda; that prior,
+      more fundamental and greater associations prevailed over his little new
+      grip upon her mind and senses. He stared at husband and wife aghast in
+      this realization. Then his resolute romanticism came to his help. &ldquo;I would
+      trust you&mdash;&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;If you tell me to go&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid her hand upon his arm. &ldquo;Go, my dear Pip,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham as
+      though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen, somewhere,
+      he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in a gap that
+      otherwise he could not have supplied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly
+      dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WELL?&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She held out her arms to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you leave me, Cheetah? Why did you leave me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      28
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham affected to ignore those proffered arms. But they recalled in a
+      swift rush the animal anger that had brought him back to England. To
+      remind him of desire now was to revive an anger stronger than any desire.
+      He spoke seeking to hurt her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am wondering now,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;why the devil I came back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had to come back to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could have written just as well about these things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;CHEETAH,&rdquo; she said softly, and came towards him slowly, stooping forward
+      and looking into his eyes, &ldquo;you had to come back to see your old Leopard.
+      Your wretched Leopard. Who has rolled in the dirt. And is still yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you want a divorce? How are we to fix things, Amanda?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah, I will tell you how we will fix things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She dropped upon the step below him. She laid her hands with a deliberate
+      softness upon him, she gave a toss so that her disordered hair was a
+      little more disordered, and brought her soft chin down to touch his knees.
+      Her eyes implored him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You are going to forgive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat rigid, meeting her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;you would be astonished if I kicked you away
+      from me and trampled over you to the door. That is what I want to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do it,&rdquo; she said, and the grip of her hands tightened. &ldquo;Cheetah, dear! I
+      would love you to kill me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to kill you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes dilated. &ldquo;Beat me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I haven't the remotest intention of making love to you,&rdquo; he said, and
+      pushed her soft face and hands away from him as if he would stand up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She caught hold of him again. &ldquo;Stay with me,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no effort to shake off her grip. He looked at the dark cloud of
+      her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of old delights
+      made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as he spoke. &ldquo;Dear
+      Leopard,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we humans are the most streaky of conceivable things.
+      I thought I hated you. I do. I hate you like poison. And also I do not
+      hate you at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then abruptly he was standing over her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose to her knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stay here, old Cheetah!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;This is your house. I am your wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went towards the unfastened front door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she cried with a note of despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He halted at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda, I will come to-morrow. I will come in the morning, in the sober
+      London daylight, and then we will settle things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled. He spoke as one who
+      remarks upon a quite unexpected fact....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human being that I wanted so
+      little to kill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      29
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White found a fragment that might have been written within a week of those
+      last encounters of Benham and Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The thing that astonished me most in Amanda was the change in her mental
+      quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With me in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she had
+      deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself. Her
+      personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it was
+      gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing of poses
+      and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei. Beneath that
+      surface I could not discover anything individual at all. Fear and a
+      grasping quality, such as God gave us all when he gave us hands; but the
+      individual I knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard was gone. Whither,
+      I cannot imagine. An amazing disappearance. Clean out of space and time
+      like a soul lost for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene, she
+      acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in reality....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this way, by
+      cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she despised.... There can
+      be no inequality in love. Give and take must balance. One must be one's
+      natural self or the whole business is an indecent trick, a vile use of
+      life! To use inferiors in love one must needs talk down to them, interpret
+      oneself in their insufficient phrases, pretend, sentimentalize. And it is
+      clear that unless oneself is to be lost, one must be content to leave
+      alone all those people that one can reach only by sentimentalizing. But
+      Amanda&mdash;and yet somehow I love her for it still&mdash;could not leave
+      any one alone. So she was always feverishly weaving nets of false
+      relationship. Until her very self was forgotten. So she will go on until
+      the end. With Easton it had been necessary for her to key herself to a
+      simple exalted romanticism that was entirely insincere. She had so
+      accustomed herself to these poses that her innate gestures were forgotten.
+      She could not recover them; she could not even reinvent them. Between us
+      there were momentary gleams as though presently we should be our frank
+      former selves again. They were never more than momentary....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that was all that this astonishing man had seen fit to tell of his
+      last parting from his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps he did Amanda injustice. Perhaps there was a stronger thread of
+      reality in her desire to recover him than he supposed. Clearly he believed
+      that under the circumstances Amanda would have tried to recover anybody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had dressed for that morning's encounter in a very becoming and
+      intimate wrap of soft mauve and white silk, and she had washed and dried
+      her dark hair so that it was a vapour about her face. She set herself with
+      a single mind to persuade herself and Benham that they were inseparable
+      lovers, and she would not be deflected by his grim determination to
+      discuss the conditions of their separation. When he asked her whether she
+      wanted a divorce, she offered to throw over Sir Philip and banish him for
+      ever as lightly as a great lady might sacrifice an objectionable poodle to
+      her connubial peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham passed through perplexing phases, so that she herself began to feel
+      that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands. His initial grimness
+      she could understand, and partially its breakdown into irritability. But
+      she was puzzled by his laughter. For he laughed abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of tremendous tragedy. And
+      really,&mdash;you are a Lark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then overriding her altogether, he told her what he meant to do about
+      their future and the future of their little son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't want a divorce and a fuss. Then I'll leave things. I perceive
+      I've no intention of marrying any more. But you'd better do the straight
+      thing. People forget and forgive. Especially when there is no one about
+      making a fuss against you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for shirking it. We'll
+      both be able to get at the boy then. You'll not hurt him, and I shall want
+      to see him. It's better for the boy anyhow not to have a divorce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll not stand in your way. I'll get a little flat and I shan't come too
+      much to London, and when I do, you can get out of town. You must be
+      discreet about Easton, and if people say anything about him, send them to
+      me. After all, this is our private affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll go on about money matters as we have been going. I trust to you not
+      to run me into overwhelming debts. And, of course, if at any time, you do
+      want to marry&mdash;on account of children or anything&mdash;if nobody
+      knows of this conversation we can be divorced then....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while Amanda
+      gathered her forces for her last appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down
+      before him and clung to his knees. He struggled ridiculously to get
+      himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate on the
+      floor with her dishevelled hair about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark
+      Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet
+      without. He had come back. The door reopened. There was a slight pause,
+      and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the second
+      housemaid. There are moments, suspended fragments of time rather than
+      links in its succession, when the human eye is more intelligible than any
+      words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a click of
+      the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;DAMN!&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then slowly she rose to her knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She meditated through vast moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a cursed thing to be a woman,&rdquo; said Amanda. She stood up. She put
+      her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot about it.
+      After another long interval of thought she spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;Old Cheetah!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't THINK it of you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a
+      reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who packs
+      a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      30
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in Danebury
+      Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham's private processes
+      the morning after this affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London. She had
+      seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly decorous
+      person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to behave violently
+      or surprise a head chambermaid in any way. On the morning of his departure
+      she was told by the first-floor waiter that the occupant of Room 26 had
+      complained of an uproar in the night, and almost immediately she was
+      summoned to see Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little
+      obscure the condition of the room behind him. He was carefully dressed,
+      and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever. But one of his hands
+      was tied up in a white bandage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going this morning,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am going down now to breakfast. I
+      have had a few little accidents with some of the things in the room and I
+      have cut my hand. I want you to tell the manager and see that they are
+      properly charged for on the bill.... Thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's things were all packed up and the room had an air of having been
+      straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive cataclysm. One
+      or two items that the chambermaid might possibly have overlooked in the
+      normal course of things were carefully exhibited. For example, the sheet
+      had been torn into half a dozen strips and they were lying side by side on
+      the bed. The clock on the mantelpiece had been knocked into the fireplace
+      and then pounded to pieces. All the looking-glasses in the room were
+      smashed, apparently the electric lamp that stood on the night table by the
+      bedside had been wrenched off and flung or hammered about amidst the other
+      breakables. And there was a considerable amount of blood splashed about
+      the room. The head chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the
+      spectacle and summoned her most convenient friend, the head chambermaid on
+      the third floor, to her aid. The first-floor waiter joined their
+      deliberations and several housemaids displayed a respectful interest in
+      the matter. Finally they invoked the manager. He was still contemplating
+      the scene of the disorder when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates
+      warned him of Benham's return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly tranquil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had a kind of nightmare,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I am fearfully sorry to have
+      disarranged your room. You must charge me for the inconvenience as well as
+      for the damage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      31
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An aristocrat cannot be a lover.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of life and
+      the intricacies of another human being. I do not mean that one may not
+      love. One loves the more because one does not concentrate one's love. One
+      loves nations, the people passing in the street, beasts hurt by the
+      wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons in tears....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's hands I
+      do not think one can expect to be loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An aristocrat must do without close personal love....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper. The writing ended
+      halfway down the page. Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it
+      was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter
+      that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations. Its incompleteness made
+      its expression perfect....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There Benham's love experience ended. He turned to the great business of
+      the world. Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like Fear
+      they were to be dismissed as far as possible and subdued when they could
+      not be altogether dismissed. Whatever stirrings of blood or imagination
+      there were in him after that parting, whatever failures from this
+      resolution, they left no trace on the rest of his research, which was
+      concerned with the hates of peoples and classes and war and peace and the
+      possibilities science unveils and starry speculations of what mankind may
+      do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      32
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter with
+      Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger and
+      distress. Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so hopelessly
+      dispersed and mixed. And when for a moment it seemed to him that she was
+      not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all, then with an instant
+      eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory gleam. &ldquo;What are you doing in
+      England, Poff?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;And what are you going to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing! And you are going to leave her in your house, with your property
+      and a lover. If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come back? And why did
+      you ever marry her? You might have known; her father was a swindler. She's
+      begotten of deceit. She'll tell her own story while you are away, and a
+      pretty story she'll make of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never wanted you to go away from her. If you'd stayed and watched her
+      as a man should, as I begged you and implored you to do. Didn't I tell
+      you, Poff? Didn't I warn you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But now what am I to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There you are! That's just a man's way. You get yourself into this
+      trouble, you follow your passions and your fancies and fads and then you
+      turn to me! How can I help you now, Poff? If you'd listened to me before!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her blue eyes were demonstratively round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I warned you,&rdquo; she interrupted. &ldquo;I warned you. I've done all I could for
+      you. It isn't that I haven't seen through her. When she came to me at
+      first with that made-up story of a baby! And all about loving me like her
+      own mother. But I did what I could. I thought we might still make the best
+      of a bad job. And then&mdash;. I might have known she couldn't leave Pip
+      alone.... But for weeks I didn't dream. I wouldn't dream. Right under my
+      nose. The impudence of it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice broke. &ldquo;Such a horrid mess! Such a hopeless, horrid mess!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She wiped away a bright little tear....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all alike. It's your way with us. All of you. There isn't a man in
+      the world deserves to have a woman in the world. We do all we can for you.
+      We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for you and we talk for you. All
+      the sweet, warm little women there are! And then you go away from us!
+      There never was a woman yet who pleased and satisfied a man, who did not
+      lose him. Give you everything and off you must go! Lovers, mothers....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother's troubles did not deal
+      exclusively with himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Amanda,&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you'd looked after her properly, it would have been right enough. Pip
+      was as good as gold until she undermined him.... A woman can't wait about
+      like an umbrella in a stand.... He was just a boy.... Only of course there
+      she was&mdash;a novelty. It is perfectly easy to understand. She flattered
+      him.... Men are such fools.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still&mdash;it's no good saying that now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she'll spend all your money, Poff! She'll break your back with debts.
+      What's to prevent her? With him living on her! For that's what it comes to
+      practically.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what am I to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You aren't going back without tying her up, Poff? You ought to stop every
+      farthing of her money&mdash;every farthing. It's your duty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't do things like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But have you no Shame? To let that sort of thing go on!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I don't feel the Shame of it&mdash; And I don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that money&mdash;. I got you that money, Poff! It was my money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stared at her perplexed. &ldquo;What am I to do?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay her through a solicitor. Say
+      that if she sees him ONCE again&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He reflected. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff!&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;every time I see you, you are more and more like your
+      father. You're going off&mdash;just as he did. That baffled, MULISH look&mdash;priggish&mdash;solemn!
+      Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor woman has to bring into the world. But
+      you'll do nothing. I know you'll do nothing. You'll stand everything. You&mdash;you
+      Cuckold! And she'll drive by me, she'll pass me in theatres with the money
+      that ought to have been mine! Oh! Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other. But she
+      went on talking. Faster and faster, less and less coherently; more and
+      more wildly abusive. Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham sighed
+      profoundly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It brought the scene to a painful end....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in
+      default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her&mdash;he
+      could never define what he owed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, what on earth was one to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had
+      misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred
+      goodwill. He went down to see him before he returned to India. But if
+      there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham senior, it had been very
+      carefully boarded over. The parental mind and attention were entirely
+      engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD about the heuristic method.
+      Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the thing was
+      rankling almost unendurably. It seemed to be a relief to him to show his
+      son very fully the essentially illogical position of his assailant. He was
+      entirely inattentive to Benham's carefully made conversational
+      opportunities. He would be silent at times while Benham talked and then he
+      would break out suddenly with: &ldquo;What seems to me so unreasonable, so
+      ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second argument&mdash;if one can
+      call it an argument&mdash;.... A man who reasons as he does is bound to
+      get laughed at. If people will only see it....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913. Sometimes the
+      two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection, sometimes
+      with great bitterness. When he met White in Johannesburg during the strike
+      period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in London and to settle their
+      relationship upon a new and more definite footing. It was her suggestion
+      that they should meet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction. He could not
+      persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his relations to her
+      squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at no precise
+      point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ignoble step.
+      Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life. Like all of
+      us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life in a
+      certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an entirely
+      different and unexpected way.... He had been ready for noble deeds and
+      villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the dominant fact
+      of his personal life was a perplexing riddle. He could not hate and
+      condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of exoneration; he
+      could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without immediate shame and
+      resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he could not banish her
+      from his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his mind;
+      he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but often he
+      could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing denied, she was
+      almost more potent than she had been as a thing accepted. Meanwhile he
+      worked. His nervous irritability increased, but it did not hinder the
+      steady development of his Research.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and
+      method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put
+      together under his headings of the first three &ldquo;Limitations.&rdquo; He had
+      resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that instinctive
+      preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which he chose to
+      term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of Amanda he had to a
+      large extent succeeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda. He stuck the more grimly
+      to his Research to drown that beating in his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
+      prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this dream of
+      a larger human purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and define
+      that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and comprehending
+      form of all the activities of the noble life. One cannot be noble, he had
+      come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to an end. To make human
+      life, collectively and in detail, a thing more comprehensive, more
+      beautiful, more generous and coherent than it is to-day seemed to him the
+      fundamental intention of all nobility. He believed more and more firmly
+      that the impulses to make and help and subserve great purposes are
+      abundantly present in the world, that they are inhibited by hasty
+      thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and that the real ennoblement
+      of human life was not so much a creation as a release. He lumped the
+      preventive and destructive forces that keep men dispersed, unhappy, and
+      ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and he made this Prejudice his
+      fourth and greatest and most difficult limitation. In one place he had
+      written it, &ldquo;Prejudice or Divisions.&rdquo; That being subdued in oneself and in
+      the world, then in the measure of its subjugation, the new life of our
+      race, the great age, the noble age, would begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world about
+      him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties and
+      mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White
+      struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of this
+      search for &ldquo;Prejudice.&rdquo; It seemed to White to be at once the most
+      magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises. It was indeed no
+      less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure and
+      disorder.... And it was all too manifest to White also that the last place
+      in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the back of
+      his own head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array of
+      influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of patriotism,
+      religious and social intolerance, every social consequence of muddle
+      headedness, every dividing force indeed except the purely personal
+      dissensions between man and man. And he developed a metaphysical
+      interpretation of these troubles. &ldquo;No doubt,&rdquo; he wrote in one place, &ldquo;much
+      of the evil between different kinds of men is due to uncultivated feeling,
+      to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to bad thinking.&rdquo; At times
+      he seemed on the verge of the persuasion that most human trouble is really
+      due to bad metaphysics. It was, one must remark, an extraordinary journey
+      he had made; he had started from chivalry and arrived at metaphysics;
+      every knight he held must be a logician, and ultimate bravery is courage
+      of the mind. One thinks of his coming to this conclusion with knit brows
+      and balancing intentness above whole gulfs of bathos&mdash;very much as he
+      had once walked the Leysin Bisse....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men do not know how to think,&rdquo; he insisted&mdash;getting along the
+      planks; &ldquo;and they will not realize that they do not know how to think.
+      Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of misconceptions....
+      Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the mind, and muddled thinking
+      as ignoble as dirty conduct.... Infinitely more disastrous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And again he wrote: &ldquo;Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too eager
+      to get into action. There is our deepest trouble. He takes conclusions
+      ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry. Life is so short that he thinks
+      it better to err than wait. He has no patience, no faith in anything but
+      himself. He thinks he is a being when in reality he is only a link in a
+      being, and so he is more anxious to be complete than right. The last
+      devotion of which he is capable is that devotion of the mind which suffers
+      partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive thought. He scamps his
+      thought and finishes his performance, and before he is dead it is already
+      being abandoned and begun all over again by some one else in the same
+      egotistical haste....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these words
+      should have been written by a man who walked the plank to fresh ideas with
+      the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward, and
+      who acted time after time with an altogether disastrous hastiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the
+      cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice
+      and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research
+      Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays and
+      abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale, than you
+      can profess religion and refuse to think about God. In the past it was
+      possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to
+      unexamined things. One could be loyal to unexamined things because they
+      were unchallenged things. But now everything is challenged. By the time of
+      his second visit to Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious and deliberate
+      aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal responsibility had
+      already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he was, as it were, an
+      uncrowned king in the world. To be noble is to be aristocratic, that is to
+      say, a ruler. Thence it follows that aristocracy is multiple kingship, and
+      to be an aristocrat is to partake both of the nature of philosopher and
+      king....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no means
+      necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in quality, petty in
+      spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and limited, fall far short of
+      kingship. Nevertheless, there IS nobility, there IS kingship, or this
+      earth is a dustbin and mankind but a kind of skin-disease upon a planet.
+      From that it is an easy step to this idea, the idea whose first expression
+      had already so touched the imagination of Amanda, of a sort of diffused
+      and voluntary kingship scattered throughout mankind. The aristocrats are
+      not at the high table, the kings are not enthroned, those who are
+      enthroned are but pretenders and SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar; the real
+      king and ruler is every man who sets aside the naive passions and
+      self-interest of the common life for the rule and service of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary writing. It
+      is one of those ideas that seem to appear simultaneously at many points in
+      the world, and it is impossible to say now how far Benham was an
+      originator of this idea, and how far he simply resonated to its expression
+      by others. It was far more likely that Prothero, getting it heaven knows
+      where, had spluttered it out and forgotten it, leaving it to germinate in
+      the mind of his friend....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to Benham as
+      his life went on. When Benham walked the Bisse he was just a youngster
+      resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled in the jungle by night
+      he was there for all mankind. With every year he became more and more
+      definitely to himself a consecrated man as kings are consecrated. Only
+      that he was self-consecrated, and anointed only in his heart. At last he
+      was, so to speak, Haroun al Raschid again, going unsuspected about the
+      world, because the palace of his security would not tell him the secrets
+      of men's disorders. He was no longer a creature of circumstances, he was
+      kingly, unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the Danes. In the great later
+      accumulations of his Research the personal matter, the introspection, the
+      intimate discussion of motive, becomes less and less. He forgets himself
+      in the exaltation of kingliness. He worries less and less over the
+      particular rightness of his definite acts. In these later papers White
+      found Benham abstracted, self-forgetful, trying to find out with an ever
+      increased self-detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why
+      there are massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why we let famine,
+      disease and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast multitudes
+      in the midst of possible plenty. And when he found out and as far as he
+      found out, he meant quite simply and earnestly to apply his knowledge....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The intellectualism of Benham intensified to the end. His definition of
+      Prejudice impressed White as being the most bloodless and philosophical
+      formula that ever dominated the mind of a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prejudice,&rdquo; Benham had written, &ldquo;is that common incapacity of the human
+      mind to understand that a difference in any respect is not a difference in
+      all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by an instinctive
+      hostility to what is unlike ourselves. We exaggerate classification and
+      then charge it with mischievous emotion by referring it to ourselves.&rdquo; And
+      under this comprehensive formula he proceeded to study and attack Family
+      Prejudice, National Prejudice, Race Prejudice, War, Class Prejudice,
+      Professional Prejudice, Sex Prejudice, in the most industrious and
+      elaborate manner. Whether one regards one's self or others he held that
+      these prejudices are evil things. &ldquo;From the point of view of human welfare
+      they break men up into wars and conflicts, make them an easy prey to those
+      who trade upon suspicion and hostility, prevent sane collective
+      co-operations, cripple and embitter life. From the point of view of
+      personal aristocracy they make men vulgar, violent, unjust and futile. All
+      the conscious life of the aristocrat must be a constant struggle against
+      false generalizations; it is as much his duty to free himself from that as
+      from fear, indulgence, and jealousy; it is a larger and more elaborate
+      task, but it is none the less cardinal and essential. Indeed it is more
+      cardinal and essential. The true knight has to be not only no coward, no
+      self-pamperer, no egotist. He has to be a philosopher. He has to be no
+      hasty or foolish thinker. His judgment no more than his courage is to be
+      taken by surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To subdue fear, desire and jealousy, is the aristocrat's personal affair,
+      it is his ritual and discipline, like a knight watching his arms; but the
+      destruction of division and prejudice and all their forms and
+      establishments, is his real task, that is the common work of knighthood.
+      It is a task to be done in a thousand ways; one man working by persuasion,
+      another by example, this one overthrowing some crippling restraint upon
+      the freedom of speech and the spread of knowledge, and that preparing
+      himself for a war that will shatter a tyrannous presumption. Most
+      imaginative literature, all scientific investigation, all sound criticism,
+      all good building, all good manufacture, all sound politics, every honesty
+      and every reasoned kindliness contribute to this release of men from the
+      heat and confusions of our present world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part of
+      his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he was not
+      making his own personal research alone, but, side by side with a vast,
+      masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of others; that this great
+      idea of his was under kindred forms the great idea of thousands, that it
+      was breaking as the dawn breaks, simultaneously to great numbers of
+      people, and that the time was not far off when the new aristocracy, the
+      disguised rulers of the world, would begin to realize their common bent
+      and effort. Into these latter papers there creeps more and more frequently
+      a new phraseology, such expressions as the &ldquo;Invisible King&rdquo; and the
+      &ldquo;Spirit of Kingship,&rdquo; so that as Benham became personally more and more
+      solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of mankind.
+      He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices worked, to get
+      at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of prejudice, and to
+      devise means for its treatment, destruction or neutralization. He had no
+      great faith in the power of pure reasonableness; his psychological ideas
+      were modern, and he had grasped the fact that the power of most of the
+      great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual
+      level. Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
+      with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to discover
+      their sub-rational springs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven
+      Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience
+      decided could not possibly &ldquo;make a book,&rdquo; consisted of notes and
+      discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this or
+      that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary
+      trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in
+      Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom he had his first really
+      illuminating encounter with race and culture prejudice. His examination of
+      the social and political condition of Russia seems to have left him much
+      more hopeful than was the common feeling of liberal-minded people during
+      the years of depression that followed the revolution of 1906, and it was
+      upon the race question that his attention concentrated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India. Here in an entirely
+      different environment was another discord of race and culture, and he
+      found in his study of it much that illuminated and corrected his
+      impressions of the Russian issue. A whole drawer was devoted to a
+      comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into human dissensions in
+      lower Bengal. Here there were not only race but culture conflicts, and he
+      could work particularly upon the differences between men of the same race
+      who were Hindus, Christians and Mahometans respectively. He could compare
+      the Bengali Mahometan not only with the Bengali Brahminist, but also with
+      the Mahometan from the north-west. &ldquo;If one could scrape off all the creed
+      and training, would one find much the same thing at the bottom, or
+      something fundamentally so different that no close homogeneous social life
+      and not even perhaps a life of just compromise is possible between the
+      different races of mankind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His answer to that was a confident one. &ldquo;There are no such natural and
+      unalterable differences in character and quality between any two sorts of
+      men whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly co-operation in the
+      world impossible,&rdquo; he wrote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was not satisfied with his observations in India. He found the
+      prevalence of caste ideas antipathetic and complicating. He went on after
+      his last parting from Amanda into China, it was the first of several
+      visits to China, and thence he crossed to America. White found a number of
+      American press-cuttings of a vehemently anti-Japanese quality still
+      awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it was clear to him that Benham had
+      given a considerable amount of attention to the development of the &ldquo;white&rdquo;
+       and &ldquo;yellow&rdquo; race hostility on the Pacific slope; but his chief interest
+      at that time had been the negro. He went to Washington and thence south;
+      he visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at a tangent to Hayti.
+      He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid book, WHERE BLACK RULES
+      WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able to visit that wonderful
+      monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La Ferriere, the citadel
+      built a century ago by the &ldquo;Black Napoleon,&rdquo; the Emperor Christophe. He
+      went with a young American demonstrator from Harvard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a memorable excursion. They rode from Cap Haytien for a day's
+      journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of luxurious
+      vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of unbridled jungle with
+      populous country. They passed countless villages of thatched huts alive
+      with curiosity and swarming with naked black children, and yet all the
+      time they seemed to be in a wilderness. They forded rivers, they had at
+      times to force themselves through thickets, once or twice they lost their
+      way, and always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great mountain peak
+      with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the background until it
+      dominated the landscape. Long after dark they blundered upon rather than
+      came to the village at its foot where they were to pass the night. They
+      were interrogated under a flaring torch by peering ragged black soldiers,
+      and passed through a firelit crowd into the presence of the local
+      commandant to dispute volubly about their right to go further. They might
+      have been in some remote corner of Nigeria. Their papers, laboriously got
+      in order, were vitiated by the fact, which only became apparent by
+      degrees, that the commandant could not read. They carried their point with
+      difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But they carried their point, and, watched and guarded by a hungry
+      half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of trousers,
+      they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of imperialism that
+      humanity has ever made. The roads and parks and prospects constructed by
+      this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long since disappeared, and the three
+      men clambered for hours up ravines and precipitous jungle tracks,
+      occasionally crossing the winding traces of a choked and ruined road that
+      had once been the lordly approach to his fastness. Below they passed an
+      abandoned palace of vast extent, a palace with great terraces and the
+      still traceable outline of gardens, though there were green things pushing
+      between the terrace steps, and trees thrust out of the empty windows. Here
+      from a belvedere of which the skull-like vestige still remained, the negro
+      Emperor Christophe, after fourteen years of absolute rule, had watched for
+      a time the smoke of the burning of his cane-fields in the plain below, and
+      then, learning that his bodyguard had deserted him, had gone in and blown
+      out his brains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had christened the place after the best of examples, &ldquo;Sans Souci.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he never
+      used. The defection of his guards made him abandon that. To build it, they
+      say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives. He had the true Imperial
+      lavishness. So high it was, so lost in a wilderness of trees and bush,
+      looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch
+      and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky&mdash;for even the
+      guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in
+      its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside its walls&mdash;and at
+      the same time so huge and grandiose&mdash;there were walls thirty feet
+      thick, galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls,
+      king's apartments and queen's apartments, towering battlements and great
+      arched doorways&mdash;that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and
+      passing of that miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing of
+      multitudes before one man and the transitoriness of such glories, more
+      completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world before.
+      Beneath the battlements&mdash;they are choked above with jungle grass and
+      tamarinds and many flowery weeds&mdash;the precipice fell away a sheer two
+      thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain populous and
+      diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an amethystine wall.
+      Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling his victims, and below
+      this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons where men, broken and torn,
+      thrust in at the neck-like hole above, starved and died: it was his
+      headquarters here, here he had his torture chambers and the means for
+      nameless cruelties....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a hundred years ago,&rdquo; said Benham's companion, and told the story of
+      the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leap,&rdquo; said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one
+      questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last gesture
+      of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed, and with a
+      convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down through the shimmering
+      air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Came presently the little faint sound of his fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this
+      projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and
+      presently struggled and found itself still a living man. It could scramble
+      down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for mercy. An hour and
+      it stood before Christophe again, with an arm broken and bloody and a face
+      torn, a battered thing now but with a faint flavour of pride in its
+      bearing. &ldquo;Your bidding has been done, Sire,&rdquo; it said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So,&rdquo; said the Emperor, unappeased. &ldquo;And you live? Well&mdash; Leap
+      again....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then came other stories. The young man told them as he had heard them,
+      stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men standing along the walls
+      of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by one as the feast went on, of
+      exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and his one note of wonder, his
+      refrain was, &ldquo;HERE! Not a hundred years ago.... It makes one almost
+      believe that somewhere things of this sort are being done now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins. The lizards
+      which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the sunshine. The
+      soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his black fingers in the
+      ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a search for some saleable
+      memento....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sat musing in silence. The thought of deliberate cruelty was always
+      an actual physical distress to him. He sat bathed in the dreamy afternoon
+      sunlight and struggled against the pictures that crowded into his mind,
+      pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-driven men toiling in agony,
+      and of the shame of extorted obedience and of cringing and crawling black
+      figures, and the defiance of righteous hate beaten down under blow and
+      anguish. He saw eyes alight with terror and lips rolled back in agony, he
+      saw weary hopeless flight before striding proud destruction, he saw the
+      poor trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in his soul....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride, and then
+      the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes Christophes but
+      humility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his
+      superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking
+      individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience. Every natural sane
+      man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a definite
+      direction for his own partial life. At the bottom of his heart he feels,
+      even if he does not know it definitely, that his life is partial. He is
+      driven to join himself on. He obeys decision and the appearance of
+      strength as a horse obeys its rider's voice. One thinks of the pride, the
+      uncontrolled frantic will of this black ape of all Emperors, and one
+      forgets the universal docility that made him possible. Usurpation is a
+      crime to which men are tempted by human dirigibility. It is the orderly
+      peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much restraint above as stiff
+      insubordination below that has to be taught to men. There are kings and
+      tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of the unkingliness of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, Benham cast off from
+      his mind his last tolerance for earthly kings and existing States, and
+      expounded to another human being for the first time this long-cherished
+      doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is the lord of human destiny,
+      the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the sceptre and rule the
+      earth.... To the young American's naive American response to any simply
+      felt emotion, he seemed with his white earnestness and his glowing eyes a
+      veritable prophet....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the root idea of aristocracy,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never heard the underlying spirit of democracy, the real true
+      Thing in democracy, so thoroughly expressed,&rdquo; said the young American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's notes on race and racial cultures gave White tantalizing glimpses
+      of a number of picturesque experiences. The adventure in Kieff had first
+      roused Benham to the reality of racial quality. He was caught in the
+      wheels of a pogrom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before that time I had been disposed to minimize and deny race. I still
+      think it need not prevent men from the completest social co-operation, but
+      I see now better than I did how difficult it is for any man to purge from
+      his mind the idea that he is not primarily a Jew, a Teuton, or a Kelt, but
+      a man. You can persuade any one in five minutes that he or she belongs to
+      some special and blessed and privileged sort of human being; it takes a
+      lifetime to destroy that persuasion. There are these confounded
+      differences of colour, of eye and brow, of nose or hair, small differences
+      in themselves except that they give a foothold and foundation for
+      tremendous fortifications of prejudice and tradition, in which hostilities
+      and hatreds may gather. When I think of a Jew's nose, a Chinaman's eyes or
+      a negro's colour I am reminded of that fatal little pit which nature has
+      left in the vermiform appendix, a thing no use in itself and of no
+      significance, but a gathering-place for mischief. The extremest case of
+      race-feeling is the Jewish case, and even here, I am convinced, it is the
+      Bible and the Talmud and the exertions of those inevitable professional
+      champions who live upon racial feeling, far more than their common
+      distinction of blood, which holds this people together banded against
+      mankind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Between the lines of such general propositions as this White read little
+      scraps of intimation that linked with the things Benham let fall in
+      Johannesburg to reconstruct the Kieff adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had been visiting a friend in the country on the further side of
+      the Dnieper. As they drove back along dusty stretches of road amidst
+      fields of corn and sunflower and through bright little villages, they saw
+      against the evening blue under the full moon a smoky red glare rising from
+      amidst the white houses and dark trees of the town. &ldquo;The pogrom's begun,&rdquo;
+       said Benham's friend, and was surprised when Benham wanted to end a
+      pleasant day by going to see what happens after the beginning of a pogrom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was to have several surprises before at last he left Benham in disgust
+      and went home by himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Benham, with that hastiness that so flouted his exalted theories,
+      passed rapidly from an attitude of impartial enquiry to active
+      intervention. The two men left their carriage and plunged into the network
+      of unlovely dark streets in which the Jews and traders harboured....
+      Benham's first intervention was on behalf of a crouching and yelping
+      bundle of humanity that was being dragged about and kicked at a street
+      corner. The bundle resolved itself into a filthy little old man, and made
+      off with extraordinary rapidity, while Benham remonstrated with the
+      kickers. Benham's tallness, his very Gentile face, his good clothes, and
+      an air of tense authority about him had its effect, and the kickers
+      shuffled off with remarks that were partly apologies. But Benham's friend
+      revolted. This was no business of theirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham went on unaccompanied towards the glare of the burning houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time he watched. Black figures moved between him and the glare, and
+      he tried to find out the exact nature of the conflict by enquiries in
+      clumsy Russian. He was told that the Jews had insulted a religious
+      procession, that a Jew had spat at an ikon, that the shop of a cheating
+      Jew trader had been set on fire, and that the blaze had spread to the
+      adjacent group of houses. He gathered that the Jews were running out of
+      the burning block on the other side &ldquo;like rats.&rdquo; The crowd was mostly
+      composed of town roughs with a sprinkling of peasants. They were
+      mischievous but undecided. Among them were a number of soldiers, and he
+      was surprised to see a policemen, brightly lit from head to foot, watching
+      the looting of a shop that was still untouched by the flames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held back some men who had discovered a couple of women's figures
+      slinking along in the shadow beneath a wall. Behind his remonstrances the
+      Jewesses escaped. His anger against disorder was growing upon him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that night Benham found himself the leading figure amidst a party of
+      Jews who had made a counter attack upon a gang of roughs in a court that
+      had become the refuge of a crowd of fugitives. Some of the young Jewish
+      men had already been making a fight, rather a poor and hopeless fight,
+      from the windows of the house near the entrance of the court, but it is
+      doubtful if they would have made an effective resistance if it had not
+      been for this tall excited stranger who was suddenly shouting directions
+      to them in sympathetically murdered Russian. It was not that he brought
+      powerful blows or subtle strategy to their assistance, but that he put
+      heart into them and perplexity into his adversaries because he was so
+      manifestly non-partizan. Nobody could ever have mistaken Benham for a Jew.
+      When at last towards dawn a not too zealous governor called out the troops
+      and began to clear the streets of rioters, Benham and a band of Jews were
+      still keeping the gateway of that court behind a hasty but adequate
+      barricade of furniture and handbarrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ghetto could not understand him, nobody could understand him, but it
+      was clear a rare and precious visitor had come to their rescue, and he was
+      implored by a number of elderly, dirty, but very intelligent-looking old
+      men to stay with them and preserve them until their safety was assured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They could not understand him, but they did their utmost to entertain him
+      and assure him of their gratitude. They seemed to consider him as a
+      representative of the British Government, and foreign intervention on
+      their behalf is one of those unfortunate fixed ideas that no persecuted
+      Jews seem able to abandon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham found himself, refreshed and tended, sitting beside a wood fire in
+      an inner chamber richly flavoured by humanity and listening to a discourse
+      in evil but understandable German. It was a discourse upon the wrongs and
+      the greatness of the Jewish people&mdash;and it was delivered by a compact
+      middle-aged man with a big black beard and long-lashed but animated eyes.
+      Beside him a very old man dozed and nodded approval. A number of other men
+      crowded the apartment, including several who had helped to hold off the
+      rioters from the court. Some could follow the talk and ever again endorsed
+      the speaker in Yiddish or Russian; others listened with tantalized
+      expressions, their brows knit, their lips moving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a discourse Benham had provoked. For now he was at the very heart
+      of the Jewish question, and he could get some light upon the mystery of
+      this great hatred at first hand. He did not want to hear tales of
+      outrages, of such things he knew, but he wanted to understand what was the
+      irritation that caused these things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he listened. The Jew dilated at first on the harmlessness and
+      usefulness of the Jews.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do you never take a certain advantage?&rdquo; Benham threw out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Jews are cleverer than the Russians. Must we suffer for that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The spokesman went on to the more positive virtues of his race. Benham
+      suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling of the Gentile who finds a bill
+      being made against him. Did the world owe Israel nothing for Philo, Aron
+      ben Asher, Solomon Gabriol, Halevy, Mendelssohn, Heine, Meyerbeer,
+      Rubinstein, Joachim, Zangwill? Does Britain owe nothing to Lord
+      Beaconsfield, Montefiore or the Rothschilds? Can France repudiate her debt
+      to Fould, Gaudahaux, Oppert, or Germany to Furst, Steinschneider,
+      Herxheimer, Lasker, Auerbach, Traube and Lazarus and Benfey?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham admitted under the pressure of urgent tones and gestures that these
+      names did undoubtedly include the cream of humanity, but was it not true
+      that the Jews did press a little financially upon the inferior peoples
+      whose lands they honoured in their exile?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man with the black beard took up the challenge bravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are merciful creditors,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And it is their genius to possess
+      and control. What better stewards could you find for the wealth of nations
+      than the Jews? And for the honours? That always had been the role of the
+      Jews&mdash;stewardship. Since the days of Joseph in Egypt....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in a lower voice he went on to speak of the deficiencies of the
+      Gentile population. He wished to be just and generous but the truth was
+      the truth. The Christian Russians loved drink and laziness; they had no
+      sense of property; were it not for unjust laws even now the Jews would
+      possess all the land of South Russia....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham listened with a kind of fascination. &ldquo;But,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so. And with a confidence that aroused a protest or so from the
+      onlookers, the Jewish apologist suddenly rose up, opened a safe close
+      beside the fire and produced an armful of documents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;all over South Russia there are these!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was a little slow to understand, until half a dozen of these papers
+      had been thrust into his hand. Eager fingers pointed, and several voices
+      spoke. These things were illegalities that might some day be legal; there
+      were the records of loans and hidden transactions that might at any time
+      put all the surrounding soil into the hands of the Jew. All South Russia
+      was mortgaged....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But is it so?&rdquo; asked Benham, and for a time ceased to listen and stared
+      into the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he held up the papers in his hand to secure silence and, feeling his
+      way in unaccustomed German, began to speak and continued to speak in spite
+      of a constant insurgent undertone of interruption from the Jewish
+      spokesman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All men, Benham said, were brothers. Did they not remember Nathan the
+      Wise?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not claim him,&rdquo; said the spokesman, misunderstanding. &ldquo;He is a
+      character in fiction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But all men are brothers, Benham maintained. They had to be merciful to
+      one another and give their gifts freely to one another. Also they had to
+      consider each other's weaknesses. The Jews were probably justified in
+      securing and administering the property of every community into which they
+      came, they were no doubt right in claiming to be best fitted for that
+      task, but also they had to consider, perhaps more than they did, the
+      feelings and vanities of the host population into which they brought these
+      beneficent activities. What was said of the ignorance, incapacity and vice
+      of the Roumanians and Russians was very generally believed and accepted,
+      but it did not alter the fact that the peasant, for all his incapacity,
+      did like to imagine he owned his own patch and hovel and did have a
+      curious irrational hatred of debt....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The faces about Benham looked perplexed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THIS,&rdquo; said Benham, tapping the papers in his hand. &ldquo;They will not
+      understand the ultimate benefit of it. It will be a source of anger and
+      fresh hostility. It does not follow because your race has supreme
+      financial genius that you must always follow its dictates to the exclusion
+      of other considerations....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The perplexity increased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham felt he must be more general. He went on to emphasize the
+      brotherhood of man, the right to equal opportunity, equal privilege,
+      freedom to develop their idiosyncrasies as far as possible, unhindered by
+      the idiosyncrasies of others. He could feel the sympathy and understanding
+      of his hearers returning. &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;you must have
+      generosity. You must forget ancient scores. Do you not see the world must
+      make a fresh beginning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was entirely convinced he had them with him. The heads nodded assent,
+      the bright eyes and lips followed the slow disentanglement of his bad
+      German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Free yourselves and the world,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so,&rdquo; he said breaking unconsciously into English, &ldquo;let us begin by
+      burning these BEASTLY mortgages!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the fire.
+      The assenting faces became masks of horror. A score of hands clutched at
+      those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger filled the room.
+      Some one caught at his throat from behind. &ldquo;Don't kill him!&rdquo; cried some
+      one. &ldquo;He fought for us!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled and
+      battered condition to his hotel. He found his friend in anxious
+      consultation with the hotel proprietor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were afraid that something had happened to you,&rdquo; said his friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got a little involved,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hasn't some one clawed your cheek?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very probably,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And torn your coat? And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a complicated misunderstanding,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Oh! pardon! I'm
+      rather badly bruised upon that arm you're holding.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my point of
+      view,&rdquo; he said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not sure if they quite followed my German....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's odd, too, that I remember saying, 'Let's burn these mortgages,' and
+      at the time I'm almost sure I didn't know the German for mortgage....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to grasp the
+      full intention behind Benham's proceedings. His aristocratic impulses were
+      apt to run away with his conceptions of brotherhood, and time after time
+      it was only too manifest to White that Benham's pallid flash of anger had
+      astonished the subjects of his disinterested observations extremely. His
+      explorations in Hayti had been terminated abruptly by an affair with a
+      native policeman that had necessitated the intervention of the British
+      Consul. It was begun with that suddenness that was too often
+      characteristic of Benham, by his hitting the policeman. It was in the main
+      street of Cap Haytien, and the policeman had just clubbed an unfortunate
+      youth over the head with the heavily loaded wooden club which is the
+      normal instrument of Haytien discipline. His blow was a repartee, part of
+      a triangular altercation in which a large, voluble, mahogany-coloured lady
+      whose head was tied up in a blue handkerchief played a conspicuous part,
+      but it seemed to Benham an entirely unjustifiable blow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had been
+      gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince to carry
+      him away. He advanced with the kind of shout one would hurl at a dog, and
+      smote the policeman to the earth with the stout stick that the peculiar
+      social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him to carry. By the local
+      standard his blow was probably a trivial one, but the moral effect of his
+      indignant pallor and a sort of rearing tallness about him on these
+      occasions was always very considerable. Unhappily these characteristics
+      could have no effect on a second negro policeman who was approaching the
+      affray from behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on the shoulder that
+      was meant for the head, and with the assistance of his colleague
+      overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to the
+      lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer's superior
+      knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his British
+      citizenship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German gunboat was
+      still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed it that in spite of
+      his blank refusal to compensate the man he had knocked over, he was after
+      two days of anger, two days of extreme insanitary experience, and much
+      meditation upon his unphilosophical hastiness, released.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified his
+      enquiries into Indian conditions. They too turned for the most part on his
+      facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt desire for human
+      brotherhood. At last indeed came an affair that refused ultimately to
+      remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil that invoked newspaper
+      articles and heated controversies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
+      attraction and irritation. He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
+      intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
+      infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India into
+      a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to the other.
+      &ldquo;I came to see India,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;and there is no India. There is a great
+      number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin in the air, quietly
+      scorning everybody else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste began with
+      a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had turned an Indian
+      gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and culminated in a
+      disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness at Benares, who had
+      thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham's shadow
+      had fallen upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You unendurable snob!&rdquo; said Benham, and then lapsing into the forceful
+      and inadvisable: &ldquo;By Heaven, you SHALL eat it!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep in his
+      character as to seem almost instinctive. But he had too a very clear
+      reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in human continuity
+      in his sense of the gathering dangers they now involve. They had always,
+      he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and the destruction of
+      human dignity, but the new conditions of life that have been brought about
+      by modern science were making them far more dangerous than they had ever
+      been before. He believed that the evil and horror of war was becoming more
+      and more tremendous with every decade, and that the free play of national
+      prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness that seems to be
+      inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate catastrophe, unless a
+      real international aristocracy could be brought into being to prevent it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the drawer full of papers labelled &ldquo;Politics,&rdquo; White found a paper
+      called &ldquo;The Metal Beast.&rdquo; It showed that for a time Benham had been
+      greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were in those days
+      piling up in every country in Europe. He had gone to Essen, and at Essen
+      he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great guns that
+      were presently to smash the effete British fleet and open the Imperial way
+      to London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could not sleep,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;on account of this man and his talk and
+      the streak of hatred in his talk. He distressed me not because he seemed
+      exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary. I realized that he was more
+      human than I was, and that only killing and killing could come out of such
+      humanity. I thought of the great ugly guns I had seen, and of the still
+      greater guns he had talked about, and how gloatingly he thought of the
+      destruction they could do. I felt as I used to feel about that infernal
+      stallion that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a despairing fear,
+      a sense of monstrosity in life. And this creature who had so disturbed me
+      was only a beastly snuffy little man in an ill-fitting frock-coat, who
+      laid his knife and fork by their tips on the edge of his plate, and picked
+      his teeth with gusto and breathed into my face as he talked to me. The
+      commonest of representative men. I went about that Westphalian country
+      after that, with the conviction that headless, soulless, blood-drinking
+      metal monsters were breeding all about me. I felt that science was
+      producing a poisonous swarm, a nest of black dragons. They were crouching
+      here and away there in France and England, they were crouching like beasts
+      that bide their time, mewed up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in
+      tarpaulins as hawks are hooded.... And I had never thought very much about
+      them before, and there they were, waiting until some human fool like that
+      frock-coated thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million,
+      saw fit to call them out to action. Just out of hatred and nationalism and
+      faction....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then came a queer fancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see it more
+      and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for the happiness
+      of life. It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous plot of the rebel
+      metals against sensation. That is why in particular half-living people
+      seem to love these things. La Ferriere was a fastness of the kind of
+      tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny of the strong man
+      over men. Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of the strong
+      machine....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Science is either slave or master. These people&mdash;I mean the German
+      people and militarist people generally&mdash;have no real mastery over the
+      scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride. The monster of
+      steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive. It has
+      persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they must follow the logic
+      of its path. Whither?... Only kingship will ever master that beast of
+      steel which has got loose into the world. Nothing but the sense of
+      unconquerable kingship in us all will ever dare withstand it.... Men must
+      be kingly aristocrats&mdash;it isn't MAY be now, it is MUST be&mdash;or,
+      these confederated metals, these things of chemistry and metallurgy, these
+      explosives and mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of our race
+      into mere red-streaked froth and filth....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast's release. Would it
+      ever be given blood?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great war
+      that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is with a
+      note of incredulity that one tells oneself, 'After all this war may
+      happen. But can it happen?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war would
+      ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident to White that
+      he wanted very much to persuade himself against that idea. It was too
+      disagreeable for him to think it probable. The paper was dated 1910. It
+      was in October, 1914, that White, who was still working upon the laborious
+      uncertain account of Benham's life and thought he has recently published,
+      read what Benham had written. Benham concluded that the common-sense of
+      the world would hold up this danger until reason could get &ldquo;to the head of
+      things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are already mighty forces in Germany,&rdquo; Benham wrote, &ldquo;that will
+      struggle very powerfully to avoid a war. And these forces increase. Behind
+      the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama and the display of the
+      vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble people.... I have talked with
+      Germans of the better kind.... You cannot have a whole nation of
+      Christophes.... There also the true knighthood discovers itself.... I do
+      not believe this war will overtake us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WELL!&rdquo; said White.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better,&rdquo; the notes went
+      on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve. Other things
+      were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was too late for
+      them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over Europe,
+      because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the blood of a people,
+      because a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled.... Does no one see
+      what that metallic beast will do if they once let it loose? It will
+      trample cities; it will devour nations....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      White read this on the 9th of October, 1914. One crumpled evening paper at
+      his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: &ldquo;Rain of Incendiary Shells.
+      Antwerp Ablaze.&rdquo; Another declared untruthfully but impressively: &ldquo;Six
+      Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and
+      turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no
+      data at all&mdash;as every one did at that time&mdash;before he was able
+      to go on with Benham's manuscripts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like
+      finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between the
+      pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a
+      heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can we ever begin over again?&rdquo; said White, and sat for a long time
+      staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too that
+      men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to succeed
+      them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have to begin over again,&rdquo; said White at last, and took up Benham's
+      papers where he had laid them down....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth Limitation
+      was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position. This
+      section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the
+      psychology of economic organization....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important part
+      played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of human
+      affairs. This was a very natural result of his peculiar social
+      circumstances. Most people born to wealth and ease take the established
+      industrial system as the natural method in human affairs; it is only very
+      reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and disinterestedness that they
+      can be brought to realize that it is natural only in the sense that it has
+      grown up and come about, and necessary only because nobody is strong and
+      clever enough to rearrange it. Their experience of it is a satisfactory
+      experience. On the other hand, the better off one is, the wider is one's
+      outlook and the more alert one is to see the risks and dangers of
+      international dissensions. Travel and talk to foreigners open one's eyes
+      to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become conceivable.
+      It is in the nature of things that socialists and labour parties should
+      minimize international obligations and necessities, and equally so that
+      autocracies and aristocracies and plutocracies should be negligent of and
+      impatient about social reform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker and
+      director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful humanity and
+      enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned opportunity. It is a far
+      profounder and subtler conflict than any other in human affairs. &ldquo;I can
+      foresee a time,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;when the greater national and racial hatreds
+      may all be so weakened as to be no longer a considerable source of human
+      limitation and misery, when the suspicions of complexion and language and
+      social habit are allayed, and when the element of hatred and aggression
+      may be clean washed out of most religious cults, but I do not begin to
+      imagine a time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there will not be
+      great friction between those who employ, those who direct collective
+      action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in
+      industrialism. This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due very
+      largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort of
+      organization. Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass and
+      self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so deeply seated,
+      so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be cheerfully obedient and
+      modestly directive in war time, there is no reason why ultimately they
+      should not be so in the business of peace. But I do not understand the
+      elements of the methods by which this state of affairs can be brought
+      about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were to confess this much to an intelligent working man I know that
+      at once he would answer 'Socialism,' but Socialism is no more a solution
+      of this problem than eating is a solution when one is lost in the
+      wilderness and hungry. Of course everybody with any intelligence wants
+      Socialism, everybody, that is to say, wants to see all human efforts
+      directed to the common good and a common end, but brought face to face
+      with practical problems Socialism betrays a vast insufficiency of
+      practical suggestions. I do not say that Socialism would not work, but I
+      do say that so far Socialists have failed to convince me that they could
+      work it. The substitution of a stupid official for a greedy proprietor may
+      mean a vanished dividend, a limited output and no other human advantage
+      whatever. Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent gesture, inspiring,
+      encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not very helpful, towards the vast
+      problem of moral and material adjustment before the race. That problem is
+      incurably miscellaneous and intricate, and only by great multitudes of
+      generous workers, one working at this point and one at that, secretly
+      devoted knights of humanity, hidden and dispersed kings, unaware of one
+      another, doubting each his right to count himself among those who do these
+      kingly services, is this elaborate rightening of work and guidance to be
+      done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So from these most fundamental social difficulties he came back to his
+      panacea. All paths and all enquiries led him back to his conception of
+      aristocracy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted, self-examining yet
+      secret, making no personal nor class pretences, as the supreme need not
+      only of the individual but the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal which had brought the two
+      schoolfellows together again. White had been on his way to Zimbabwe. An
+      emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had driven him to seek
+      consolations in strange scenery and mysterious desolations. It was as if
+      Zimbabwe called to him. Benham had come to South Africa to see into the
+      question of Indian immigration, and he was now on his way to meet Amanda
+      in London. Neither man had given much heed to the gathering social
+      conflict on the Rand until the storm burst about them. There had been a
+      few paragraphs in the papers about a dispute upon a point of labour
+      etiquette, a question of the recognition of Trade Union officials, a thing
+      that impressed them both as technical, and then suddenly a long incubated
+      quarrel flared out in rioting and violence, the burning of houses and
+      furniture, attacks on mines, attempts to dynamite trains. White stayed in
+      Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded up country by the
+      railway strike that was among the possibilities of the situation. Benham
+      stayed because he was going to London very reluctantly, and he was glad of
+      this justification for a few days' delay. The two men found themselves
+      occupying adjacent tables in the Sherborough Hotel, and White was the
+      first to recognize the other. They came together with a warmth and
+      readiness of intimacy that neither would have displayed in London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White had not seen Benham since the social days of Amanda at Lancaster
+      Gate, and he was astonished at the change a few years had made in him. The
+      peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair had become more marked,
+      his skin was deader, his features seemed more prominent and his expression
+      intenser. His eyes were very bright and more sunken under his brows. He
+      had suffered from yellow fever in the West Indies, and these it seemed
+      were the marks left by that illness. And he was much more detached from
+      the people about him; less attentive to the small incidents of life, more
+      occupied with inner things. He greeted White with a confidence that White
+      was one day to remember as pathetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is good to meet an old friend,&rdquo; Benham said. &ldquo;I have lost friends. And
+      I do not make fresh ones. I go about too much by myself, and I do not
+      follow the same tracks that other people are following....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What track was he following? It was now that White first heard of the
+      Research Magnificent. He wanted to know what Benham was doing, and Benham
+      after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his interest in
+      insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions. &ldquo;It is, of course, a
+      part of something else,&rdquo; he amplified. He was writing a book, &ldquo;an enormous
+      sort of book.&rdquo; He laughed with a touch of shyness. It was about
+      &ldquo;everything,&rdquo; about how to live and how not to live. And &ldquo;aristocracy, and
+      all sorts of things.&rdquo; White was always curious about other people's books.
+      Benham became earnest and more explicit under encouragement, and to talk
+      about his book was soon to talk about himself. In various ways,
+      intentionally and inadvertently, he told White much. These chance
+      encounters, these intimacies of the train and hotel, will lead men at
+      times to a stark frankness of statement they would never permit themselves
+      with habitual friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little, considering
+      how insistent it was becoming. But the wide propositions of the Research
+      Magnificent, with its large indifference to immediate occurrences, its
+      vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in
+      White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and resentment of the
+      events about them. For him the thought of that first discussion of this
+      vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was flowering, and which he
+      was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a fringe of vivid little
+      pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and afoot under a
+      lowering twilight sky towards murmuring centres of disorder, of startling
+      flares seen suddenly afar off, of the muffled galloping of troops through
+      the broad dusty street in the night, of groups of men standing and
+      watching down straight broad roads, roads that ended in groups of chimneys
+      and squat buildings of corrugated iron. And once there was a marching body
+      of white men in the foreground and a complicated wire fence, and a
+      clustering mass of Kaffirs watching them over this fence and talking
+      eagerly amongst themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,&rdquo; said
+      Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt that it
+      was more than that. Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that eventful
+      background while Benham talked to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the
+      background the greater share of his attention....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that the
+      full values came to very many things that Benham said during these last
+      conversations. The papers fitted in with his memories of their long talks
+      like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk had repeated the
+      private writings in which he had first digested his ideas that it was
+      presently almost impossible to disentangle what had been said and
+      understood at Johannesburg from the fuller statement of those patched and
+      corrected manuscripts. The two things merged in White's mind as he read.
+      The written text took upon itself a resonance of Benham's voice; it eked
+      out the hints and broken sentences of his remembered conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their mere
+      marked absence an impression on White's mind. And occasionally after
+      Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an occasional
+      aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men who restrain
+      themselves from betraying a preoccupation. He would say nothing about
+      Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant to speak of Prothero,
+      and another peculiarity was that he referred perhaps half a dozen times or
+      more to the idea that he was a &ldquo;prig.&rdquo; He seemed to be defending himself
+      against some inner accusation, some unconquerable doubt of the entire
+      adventure of his life. These half hints and hints by omission exercised
+      the quick intuitions of White's mind very keenly, and he drew far closer
+      to an understanding of Benham's reserves than Benham ever suspected....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
+      completely justified in his treatment of her. She had betrayed him and he
+      had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control. He had no doubt that
+      he had punished her very effectively, and it was only after he had been
+      travelling in China with Prothero for some time and in the light of one or
+      two chance phrases in her letters that he began to have doubts whether he
+      ought to have punished her at all. And one night at Shanghai he had a
+      dream in which she stood before him, dishevelled and tearful, his Amanda,
+      very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was dirty and shameful and
+      spoilt for ever, because he had gone away from her. Afterwards the dream
+      became absurd: she showed him the black leopard's fur as though it was a
+      rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the leopard skin that had been
+      so bright and wonderful such a little time ago, and he awoke before he
+      could answer her, and for a long time he was full of unspoken answers
+      explaining that in view of her deliberate unfaithfulness the position she
+      took up was absurd. She had spoilt her own fur. But what was more
+      penetrating and distressing in this dream was not so much the case Amanda
+      stated as the atmosphere of unconquerable intimacy between them, as though
+      they still belonged to each other, soul to soul, as though nothing that
+      had happened afterwards could have destroyed their common responsibility
+      and the common interest of their first unstinted union. She was hurt, and
+      of course he was hurt. He began to see that his marriage to Amanda was
+      still infinitely more than a technical bond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether she
+      realized anything of the sort. Her letters fluctuated very much in tone,
+      but at times they were as detached and guarded as a schoolgirl writing to
+      a cousin. Then it seemed to Benham an extraordinary fraud on her part that
+      she should presume to come into his dream with an entirely deceptive
+      closeness and confidence. She began to sound him in these latter letters
+      upon the possibility of divorce. This, which he had been quite disposed to
+      concede in London, now struck him as an outrageous suggestion. He wrote to
+      ask her why, and she responded exasperatingly that she thought it was
+      &ldquo;better.&rdquo; But, again, why better? It is remarkable that although his mind
+      had habituated itself to the idea that Easton was her lover in London, her
+      thought of being divorced, no doubt to marry again, filled him with
+      jealous rage. She asked him to take the blame in the divorce proceedings.
+      There, again, he found himself ungenerous. He did not want to do that. Why
+      should he do that? As a matter of fact he was by no means reconciled to
+      the price he had paid for his Research Magnificent; he regretted his
+      Amanda acutely. He was regretting her with a regret that grew when by all
+      the rules of life it ought to be diminishing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in consequence of that regret and his controversies with Prothero
+      while they travelled together in China that his concern about what he
+      called priggishness arose. It is a concern that one may suppose has a
+      little afflicted every reasonably self-conscious man who has turned from
+      the natural passionate personal life to religion or to public service or
+      any abstract devotion. These things that are at least more extensive than
+      the interests of flesh and blood have a trick of becoming unsubstantial,
+      they shine gloriously and inspiringly upon the imagination, they capture
+      one and isolate one and then they vanish out of sight. It is far easier to
+      be entirely faithful to friend or lover than it is to be faithful to a
+      cause or to one's country or to a religion. In the glow of one's first
+      service that larger idea may be as closely spontaneous as a handclasp, but
+      in the darkness that comes as the glow dies away there is a fearful sense
+      of unreality. It was in such dark moments that Benham was most persecuted
+      by his memories of Amanda and most distressed by this suspicion that the
+      Research Magnificent was a priggishness, a pretentious logomachy. Prothero
+      could indeed hint as much so skilfully that at times the dream of nobility
+      seemed an insult to the sunshine, to the careless laughter of children, to
+      the good light in wine and all the warm happiness of existence. And then
+      Amanda would peep out of the dusk and whisper, &ldquo;Of course if you could
+      leave me&mdash;! Was I not LIFE? Even now if you cared to come back to me&mdash;
+      For I loved you best and loved you still, old Cheetah, long after you had
+      left me to follow your dreams.... Even now I am drifting further into lies
+      and the last shreds of dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful
+      leopard I am now, who was once clean and bright.... You could come back,
+      Cheetah, and you could save me yet. If you would love me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In certain moods she could wring his heart by such imagined speeches, the
+      very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that his ear had loved,
+      and not only could she distress him, but when Benham was in this heartache
+      mood, when once she had set him going, then his little mother also would
+      rise against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue eyes bright with
+      tears; and his frowsty father would back towards him and sit down
+      complaining that he was neglected, and even little Mrs. Skelmersdale would
+      reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking after him as he slunk away
+      from her through Kensington Gardens; indeed every personal link he had
+      ever had to life could in certain moods pull him back through the door of
+      self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching and accusing himself of
+      harshness and self-concentration. The very kittens of his childhood
+      revived forgotten moments of long-repented hardness. For a year before
+      Prothero was killed there were these heartaches. That tragedy gave them
+      their crowning justification. All these people said in this form or that,
+      &ldquo;You owed a debt to us, you evaded it, you betrayed us, you owed us life
+      out of yourself, love and services, and you have gone off from us all with
+      this life that was ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of
+      the world, and with empty phantoms of power and destiny. All this was
+      intellectualization. You sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind.
+      There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like you may lay
+      hold upon. The rule of the world is a fortuitous result of incalculably
+      multitudinous forces. But all of us you could have made happier. You could
+      have spared us distresses. Prothero died because of you. Presently it will
+      be the turn of your father, your mother&mdash;Amanda perhaps....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several memoranda
+      about priggishness that White read and came near to understanding. In
+      spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was making up his mind
+      to be a prig. He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness
+      against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate
+      sympathy for Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and he
+      made his choice. But it was a reluctant choice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One fragment began in the air. &ldquo;Of course I had made myself responsible
+      for her life. But it was, you see, such a confoundedly energetic life, as
+      vigorous and as slippery as an eel.... Only by giving all my strength to
+      her could I have held Amanda.... So what was the good of trying to hold
+      Amanda?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All one's people have this sort of claim upon one. Claims made by their
+      pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and dependences. You've
+      no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom when it means
+      snapping and tearing the silly suffering tendrils they have wrapped about
+      you. The true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp, enough
+      steadiness, to be kind and right to every human being and still do the
+      work that ought to be his essential life. I see that now. It's one of the
+      things this last year or so of loneliness has made me realize; that in so
+      far as I have set out to live the aristocratic life I have failed. Instead
+      I've discovered it&mdash;and found myself out. I'm an overstrung man. I go
+      harshly and continuously for one idea. I live as I ride. I blunder through
+      my fences, I take off too soon. I've no natural ease of mind or conduct or
+      body. I am straining to keep hold of a thing too big for me and do a thing
+      beyond my ability. Only after Prothero's death was it possible for me to
+      realize the prig I have always been, first as regards him and then as
+      regards Amanda and my mother and every one. A necessary unavoidable
+      priggishness....&rdquo; I do not see how certain things can be done without
+      prigs, people, that is to say, so concentrated and specialized in interest
+      as to be a trifle inhuman, so resolved as to be rather rhetorical and
+      forced.... All things must begin with clumsiness, there is no assurance
+      about pioneers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain
+      aristocracy.... But the very essence of aristocracy, as I conceive it, is
+      that it does not explain nor talk about itself....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all it doesn't matter what I am.... It's just a private vexation
+      that I haven't got where I meant to get. That does not affect the truth I
+      have to tell....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one must
+      speak the truth. I have worked out some very considerable things in my
+      research, and the time has come when I must set them out clearly and
+      plainly. That is my job anyhow. My journey to London to release Amanda
+      will be just the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my real life.
+      It will release me from my last entanglement with the fellow creatures I
+      have always failed to make happy.... It's a detail in the work.... And I
+      shall go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical operation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's very like that. A surgical operation, and when it is over perhaps I
+      shall think no more about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done. So far
+      I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of living. I must
+      begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can upon the details, and,
+      presently, I shall see more clearly where other men are working to the
+      same ends....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle
+      between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble life to
+      the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and sympathy for
+      the earthliness of that inglorious little don. Although Benham insisted
+      upon the dominance of life by noble imaginations and relentless
+      reasonableness, he would never altogether abandon the materialism of life.
+      Prothero had once said to him, &ldquo;You are the advocate of the brain and I of
+      the belly. Only, only we respect each other.&rdquo; And at another time, &ldquo;You
+      fear emotions and distrust sensations. I invite them. You do not drink gin
+      because you think it would make you weep. But if I could not weep in any
+      other way I would drink gin.&rdquo; And it was under the influence of Prothero
+      that Benham turned from the haughty intellectualism, the systematized
+      superiorities and refinements, the caste marks and defensive dignities of
+      India to China, that great teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow
+      humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout of elevated idealism. It
+      was only very slowly that he reconciled his mind to the idea of an
+      entirely solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream. For some time as he
+      went about the world he was trying to bring himself into relationship with
+      the advanced thinkers, the liberal-minded people who seemed to promise at
+      least a mental and moral co-operation. Yet it is difficult to see what
+      co-operation was possible unless it was some sort of agreement that
+      presently they should all shout together. And it was after a certain
+      pursuit of Rabindranath Tagore, whom he met in Hampstead, that a horror of
+      perfect manners and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled from that
+      starry calm to the rich uncleanness of the most undignified fellow of
+      Trinity. And as an advocate and exponent of the richness of the lower
+      levels of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of the uttermost
+      refinements of pride, Prothero went with Benham by way of Siberia to the
+      Chinese scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner-table in their choice of
+      food and drink. Benham was always wary and Prothero always appreciative.
+      It peeped out in the distribution of their time, in the direction of their
+      glances. Whenever women walked about, Prothero gave way to a sort of
+      ethnological excitement. &ldquo;That girl&mdash;a wonderful racial type.&rdquo; But in
+      Moscow he was sentimental. He insisted on going again to the Cosmopolis
+      Bazaar, and when he had ascertained that Anna Alexievna had vanished and
+      left no trace he prowled the streets until the small hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the eastward train he talked intermittently of her. &ldquo;I should have
+      defied Cambridge,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at every stopping station he got out upon the platform ethnologically
+      alert....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theoretically Benham was disgusted with Prothero. Really he was not
+      disgusted at all. There was something about Prothero like a sparrow, like
+      a starling, like a Scotch terrier.... These, too, are morally
+      objectionable creatures that do not disgust....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero discoursed much upon the essential goodness of Russians. He said
+      they were a people of genius, that they showed it in their faults and
+      failures just as much as in their virtues and achievements. He extolled
+      the &ldquo;germinating disorder&rdquo; of Moscow far above the &ldquo;implacable discipline&rdquo;
+       of Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a base materialist
+      people, could so maintain its attention upon precision and cleanliness.
+      Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. &ldquo;But all exaltation
+      neglects,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;No religion has ever boasted that its saints
+      were spick and span.&rdquo; This controversy raged between them in the streets
+      of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked their way through the
+      indescribable filth of Pekin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say that all this is a fine disdain for material things,&rdquo; said
+      Benham. &ldquo;But look out there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Apt to their argument a couple of sturdy young women came shuffling along,
+      cleaving the crowd in the narrow street by virtue of a single word and two
+      brace of pails of human ordure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not a fine disdain for material things,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;That is
+      merely individualism and unsystematic living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A mere phase of frankness. Only frankness is left to them now. The
+      Manchus crippled them, spoilt their roads and broke their waterways.
+      European intervention paralyses every attempt they make to establish order
+      on their own lines. In the Ming days China did not reek.... And, anyhow,
+      Benham, it's better than the silly waste of London....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in a little while Prothero discovered that China had tried Benham and
+      found him wanting, centuries and dynasties ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he asked, but the ideal of
+      Confucius, the superior person, &ldquo;the son of the King&rdquo;? There you had the
+      very essence of Benham, the idea of self-examination, self-preparation
+      under a vague Theocracy. (&ldquo;Vaguer,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;for the Confucian Heaven
+      could punish and reward.&rdquo;) Even the elaborate sham modesty of the two
+      dreams was the same. Benham interrupted and protested with heat. And this
+      Confucian idea of the son of the King, Prothero insisted, had been the
+      cause of China's paralysis. &ldquo;My idea of nobility is not traditional but
+      expectant,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;After all, Confucianism has held together a
+      great pacific state far longer than any other polity has ever lasted. I'll
+      accept your Confucianism. I've not the slightest objection to finding
+      China nearer salvation than any other land. Do but turn it round so that
+      it looks to the future and not to the past, and it will be the best social
+      and political culture in the world. That, indeed, is what is happening.
+      Mix Chinese culture with American enterprise and you will have made a new
+      lead for mankind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From that Benham drove on to discoveries. &ldquo;When a man thinks of the past
+      he concentrates on self; when he thinks of the future he radiates from
+      self. Call me a neo-Confucian; with the cone opening forward away from me,
+      instead of focussing on me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You make me think of an extinguisher,&rdquo; said Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I am thinking of a focus,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;But all your thought
+      now has become caricature.... You have stopped thinking. You are fighting
+      after making up your mind....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham's prompt endorsement of his
+      Chinese identification. He had hoped it would be exasperating. He tried to
+      barb his offence. He amplified the indictment. All cultures must be judged
+      by their reaction and fatigue products, and Confucianism had produced
+      formalism, priggishness, humbug.... No doubt its ideals had had their
+      successes; they had unified China, stamped the idea of universal peace and
+      good manners upon the greatest mass of population in the world, paved the
+      way for much beautiful art and literature and living. &ldquo;But in the end, all
+      your stern orderliness, Benham,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;only leads to me. The
+      human spirit rebels against this everlasting armour on the soul. After Han
+      came T'ang. Have you never read Ling Po? There's scraps of him in English
+      in that little book you have&mdash;what is it?&mdash;the LUTE OF JADE? He
+      was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam after the Prophet. Life
+      must relax at last....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it is
+      creative, no....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven to
+      closer enquiries into Chinese thought. He tried particularly to get to
+      mental grips with English-speaking Chinese. &ldquo;We still know nothing of
+      China,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;Most of the stuff we have been told about this
+      country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle. We send merchants from
+      Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what doesn't remind them of
+      these delectable standards seems either funny to them or wicked. I admit
+      the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to speak, in the ancient characters
+      and the ancient traditions, but for all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what
+      all the rest of the world has still to find and get. When they begin to
+      speak and write in a modern way and handle modern things and break into
+      the soil they have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find just
+      how much it is behind.... Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not such
+      fools as that, but LIFE....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
+      wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
+      foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities, delirious
+      religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with loaded guns,
+      China, even more than America, develops steadily into a massive
+      possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men followed their associated and disconnected paths. Through
+      Benham's chance speeches and notes, White caught glimpses, as one might
+      catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that bilateral adventure. He
+      saw Benham in conversation with liberal-minded mandarins, grave-faced,
+      bald-browed persons with disciplined movements, who sat with their hands
+      thrust into their sleeves talking excellent English; while Prothero
+      pursued enquiries of an intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of a
+      more confidential type. And, presently, Prothero began to discover and
+      discuss the merits of opium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, if one is to find the
+      solution of life's problem in the rational enjoyment of one's sensations,
+      why should one not use opium? It is art materialized. It gives tremendous
+      experiences with a minimum of exertion, and if presently its gifts
+      diminish one need but increase the quantity. Moreover, it quickens the
+      garrulous mind, and steadies the happiness of love. Across the varied
+      adventures of Benham's journey in China fell the shadow first of a
+      suspicion and then of a certainty....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The perfected and ancient vices of China wrapped about Prothero like some
+      tainted but scented robe, and all too late Benham sought to drag him away.
+      And then in a passion of disgust turned from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To this,&rdquo; cried Benham, &ldquo;one comes! Save for pride and fierceness!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better this than cruelty,&rdquo; said Prothero talking quickly and clearly
+      because of the evil thing in his veins. &ldquo;You think that you are the only
+      explorer of life, Benham, but while you toil up the mountains I board the
+      house-boat and float down the stream. For you the stars, for me the music
+      and the lanterns. You are the son of a mountaineering don, and I am a
+      Chinese philosopher of the riper school. You force yourself beyond fear of
+      pain, and I force myself beyond fear of consequences. What are we either
+      of us but children groping under the black cloak of our Maker?&mdash;who
+      will not blind us with his light. Did he not give us also these lusts, the
+      keen knife and the sweetness, these sensations that are like pineapple
+      smeared with saltpetre, like salted olives from heaven, like being flayed
+      with delight.... And did he not give us dreams fantastic beyond any lust
+      whatever? What is the good of talking? Speak to your own kind. I have
+      gone, Benham. I am lost already. There is no resisting any more, since I
+      have drugged away resistance. Why then should I come back? I know now the
+      symphonies of the exalted nerves; I can judge; and I say better lie and
+      hear them to the end than come back again to my old life, to my little
+      tin-whistle solo, my&mdash;effort! My EFFORT!... I ruin my body. I know.
+      But what of that?... I shall soon be thin and filthy. What of the
+      grape-skin when one has had the pulp?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;the cleanness of life!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While I perish,&rdquo; said Prothero still more wickedly, &ldquo;I say good
+      things....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      13
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White had a vision of a great city with narrow crowded streets, hung with
+      lank banners and gay with vertical vermilion labels, and of a pleasant
+      large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, a garden set with
+      artificial stones and with beasts and men and lanterns of white porcelain,
+      a garden which overlooked this city. Here it was that Benham stayed and
+      talked with his host, a man robed in marvellous silks and subtle of speech
+      even in the European languages he used, and meanwhile Prothero, it seemed,
+      had gone down into the wickedness of the town below. It was a very great
+      town indeed, spreading for miles along the banks of a huge river, a river
+      that divided itself indolently into three shining branches so as to make
+      islands of the central portion of the place. And on this river swarmed for
+      ever a vast flotilla of ships and boats, boats in which people lived,
+      boats in which they sought pleasure, moored places of assembly,
+      high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger sampans, cargo craft, such a
+      water town in streets and lanes, endless miles of it, as no other part of
+      the world save China can display. In the daylight it was gay with
+      countless sunlit colours embroidered upon a fabric of yellow and brown, at
+      night it glittered with a hundred thousand lights that swayed and quivered
+      and were reflected quiveringly upon the black flowing waters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger who
+      was for some reason very vividly realized by White's imagination. He was a
+      tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken cheeks that made his cheek bones
+      very prominent, and gave his thin-lipped mouth something of the geniality
+      of a skull, and the arm he thrust out of his yellow robe to hand
+      Prothero's message to Benham was lean as a pole. So he stood out in
+      White's imagination, against the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs
+      and blue haze of the great town below, and was with one exception the
+      distinctest thing in the story. The message he bore was scribbled by
+      Prothero himself in a nerveless scrawl: &ldquo;Send a hundred dollars by this
+      man. I am in a frightful fix.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage of
+      opium, and something in this message stirred his facile indignation. Twice
+      before he had had similar demands. And on the whole they had seemed to him
+      to be unreasonable demands. He was astonished that while he was sitting
+      and talking of the great world-republic of the future and the secret
+      self-directed aristocracy that would make it possible, his own friend, his
+      chosen companion, should thus, by this inglorious request and this
+      ungainly messenger, disavow him. He felt a wave of intense irritation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I will not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he was too angry to express himself in any language understandable by
+      his messenger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His host intervened and explained after a few questions that the occasion
+      was serious. Prothero, it seemed, had been gambling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;He is shameless. Let him do what he can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The messenger was still reluctant to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And scarcely had he gone before misgivings seized Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where IS your friend?&rdquo; asked the mandarin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they will keep him! They may do all sorts of things when they find he
+      is lying to them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lying to them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About your help.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop that man,&rdquo; cried Benham suddenly realizing his mistake. But when the
+      servants went to stop the messenger their intentions were misunderstood,
+      and the man dashed through the open gate of the garden and made off down
+      the winding road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop him!&rdquo; cried Benham, and started in pursuit, suddenly afraid for
+      Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Chinese are a people of great curiosity, and a small pebble sometimes
+      starts an avalanche....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White pieced together his conception of the circles of disturbance that
+      spread out from Benham's pursuit of Prothero's flying messenger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For weeks and months the great town had been uneasy in all its ways
+      because of the insurgent spirits from the south and the disorder from the
+      north, because of endless rumours and incessant intrigue. The stupid
+      manoeuvres of one European &ldquo;power&rdquo; against another, the tactlessness of
+      missionaries, the growing Chinese disposition to meet violence and force
+      with violence and force, had fermented and brewed the possibility of an
+      outbreak. The sudden resolve of Benham to get at once to Prothero was like
+      the firing of a mine. This tall, pale-faced, incomprehensible stranger
+      charging through the narrow streets that led to the pleasure-boats in the
+      south river seemed to many a blue-clad citizen like the White Peril
+      embodied. Behind him came the attendants of the rich man up the hill; but
+      they surely were traitors to help this stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Benham could at all realize what was happening he found his way to
+      the river-boat on which he supposed Prothero to be detained, barred by a
+      vigorous street fight. Explanations were impossible; he joined in the
+      fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For three days that fight developed round the mystery of Prothero's
+      disappearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a complicated struggle into which the local foreign traders on the
+      river-front and a detachment of modern drilled troops from the up-river
+      barracks were presently drawn. It was a struggle that was never clearly
+      explained, and at the end of it they found Prothero's body flung out upon
+      a waste place near a little temple on the river bank, stabbed while he was
+      asleep....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And from the broken fragments of description that Benham let fall, White
+      had an impression of him hunting for all those three days through the
+      strange places of a Chinese city, along narrow passages, over queer
+      Venetian-like bridges, through the vast spaces of empty warehouses, in the
+      incense-scented darkness of temple yards, along planks that passed to the
+      dark hulls of secret barges, in quick-flying boats that slipped
+      noiselessly among the larger craft, and sometimes he hunted alone,
+      sometimes in company, sometimes black figures struggled in the darkness
+      against dim-lit backgrounds and sometimes a swarm of shining yellow faces
+      screamed and shouted through the torn paper windows.... And then at the
+      end of this confused effect of struggle, this Chinese kinematograph film,
+      one last picture jerked into place and stopped and stood still, a white
+      wall in the sunshine come upon suddenly round a corner, a dirty flagged
+      passage and a stiff crumpled body that had for the first time an
+      inexpressive face....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      14
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sat at a table in the smoking-room of the Sherborough Hotel at
+      Johannesburg and told of these things. White watched him from an armchair.
+      And as he listened he noted again the intensification of Benham's face,
+      the darkness under his brows, the pallor of his skin, the touch of red in
+      his eyes. For there was still that red gleam in Benham's eyes; it shone
+      when he looked out of a darkness into a light. And he sat forward with his
+      arms folded under him, or moved his long lean hand about over the things
+      on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this is a sort of horror in my mind. Things like this
+      stick in my mind. I am always seeing Prothero now, and it will take years
+      to get this scar off my memory again. Once before&mdash;about a horse, I
+      had the same kind of distress. And it makes me tender, sore-minded about
+      everything. It will go, of course, in the long run, and it's just like any
+      other ache that lays hold of one. One can't cure it. One has to get along
+      with it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, but how was I to know
+      then that it was so imperative to send that money?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the time it seemed just pandering to his vices....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was angry. I shall never subdue that kind of hastiness altogether. It
+      takes me by surprise. Before the messenger was out of sight I had
+      repented....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I failed him. I have gone about in the world dreaming of tremendous
+      things and failing most people. My wife too....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped talking for a little time and folded his arms tight and stared
+      hard in front of himself, his lips compressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, White,&rdquo; he said, with a kind of setting of the teeth, &ldquo;this is
+      the sort of thing one has to stand. Life is imperfect. Nothing can be done
+      perfectly. And on the whole&mdash;&rdquo; He spoke still more slowly, &ldquo;I would
+      go through again with the very same things that have hurt my people. If I
+      had to live over again. I would try to do the things without hurting the
+      people, but I would do the things anyhow. Because I'm raw with remorse, it
+      does not follow that on the whole I am not doing right. Right doing isn't
+      balm. If I could have contrived not to hurt these people as I have done,
+      it would have been better, just as it would be better to win a battle
+      without any killed or wounded. I was clumsy with them and they suffered, I
+      suffer for their suffering, but still I have to stick to the way I have
+      taken. One's blunders are accidents. If one thing is clearer than another
+      it is that the world isn't accident-proof....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I wish I had sent those dollars to Prothero.... God! White, but I lie
+      awake at night thinking of that messenger as he turned away.... Trying to
+      stop him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't send those dollars. So fifty or sixty people were killed and
+      many wounded.... There for all practical purposes the thing ends. Perhaps
+      it will serve to give me a little charity for some other fool's haste and
+      blundering....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn't help it, White. I couldn't help it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes on. One thinks, one learns,
+      one adds one's contribution of experience and understanding. The spirit of
+      the race goes on to light and comprehension. In spite of accidents. In
+      spite of individual blundering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that nobility is so easy as to come
+      slick and true on every occasion....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If one gives oneself to any long aim one must reckon with minor
+      disasters. This Research I undertook grows and grows. I believe in it more
+      and more. The more it asks from me the more I give to it. When I was a
+      youngster I thought the thing I wanted was just round the corner. I
+      fancied I would find out the noble life in a year or two, just what it
+      was, just where it took one, and for the rest of my life I would live it.
+      Finely. But I am just one of a multitude of men, each one going a little
+      wrong, each one achieving a little right. And the noble life is a long,
+      long way ahead.... We are working out a new way of living for mankind, a
+      new rule, a new conscience. It's no small job for all of us. There must be
+      lifetimes of building up and lifetimes of pulling down and trying again.
+      Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy.... I see myself now
+      for the little workman I am upon this tremendous undertaking. And all my
+      life hereafter goes to serve it....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend. He spoke with a grim
+      enthusiasm. &ldquo;I'm a prig. I'm a fanatic, White. But I have something clear,
+      something better worth going on with than any adventure of personal
+      relationship could possibly be....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the faith
+      that had grown up in his mind. He spoke with a touch of defiance, with the
+      tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame. &ldquo;I will tell you
+      what I believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow
+      development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect until
+      he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he refers his
+      life to ends and purposes beyond himself. An aristocrat must be loyal. So
+      it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must also be lucid; there it is
+      that one has at once the demand for kingship and the repudiation of all
+      existing states and kings. In this manner he had come to his idea of a
+      great world republic that must replace the little warring kingdoms of the
+      present, to the conception of an unseen kingship ruling the whole globe,
+      to his King Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth and all sane loyalty.
+      &ldquo;There,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is the link of our order, the new knighthood, the new
+      aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth. There is our Prince. He is
+      in me, he is in you; he is latent in all mankind. I have worked this out
+      and tried it and lived it, and I know that outwardly and inwardly this is
+      the way a man must live, or else be a poor thing and a base one. On great
+      occasions and small occasions I have failed myself a thousand times, but
+      no failure lasts if your faith lasts. What I have learnt, what I have
+      thought out and made sure, I want now to tell the world. Somehow I will
+      tell it, as a book I suppose, though I do not know if I shall ever be able
+      to make a book. But I have away there in London or with me here all the
+      masses of notes I have made in my search for the life that is worth while
+      living.... We who are self-appointed aristocrats, who are not ashamed of
+      kingship, must speak to one another....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can have no organization because organizations corrupt....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No recognition....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But we can speak plainly....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and voices
+      of mounted police riding past the hotel.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But on one side your aristocracy means revolution,&rdquo; said White. &ldquo;It
+      becomes a political conspiracy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Manifestly. An open conspiracy. It denies the king upon the stamps and
+      the flag upon the wall. It is the continual proclamation of the Republic
+      of Mankind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      15
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The earlier phases of violence in the Rand outbreak in 1913 were manifest
+      rather in the outskirts of Johannesburg than at the centre. &ldquo;Pulling out&rdquo;
+       was going on first at this mine and then that, there were riots in Benoni,
+      attacks on strike breakers and the smashing up of a number of houses. It
+      was not until July the 4th that, with the suppression of a public meeting
+      in the market-place, Johannesburg itself became the storm centre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham and White were present at this marketplace affair, a confused crowded
+      occasion, in which a little leaven of active men stirred through a large
+      uncertain multitude of decently dressed onlookers. The whole big square
+      was astir, a swaying crowd of men. A ramshackle platform improvised upon a
+      trolley struggled through the swarming straw hats to a street corner, and
+      there was some speaking. At first it seemed as though military men were
+      using this platform, and then it was manifestly in possession of an
+      excited knot of labour leaders with red rosettes. The military men had
+      said their say and got down. They came close by Benham, pushing their way
+      across the square. &ldquo;We've warned them,&rdquo; said one. A red flag, like some
+      misunderstood remark at a tea-party, was fitfully visible and
+      incomprehensible behind the platform. Somebody was either pitched or fell
+      off the platform. One could hear nothing from the speakers except a minute
+      bleating....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there were shouts that the police were charging. A number of mounted
+      men trotted into the square. The crowd began a series of short rushes that
+      opened lanes for the passage of the mounted police as they rode to and
+      fro. These men trotted through the crowd, scattering knots of people. They
+      carried pick-handles, but they did not seem to be hitting with them. It
+      became clear that they aimed at the capture of the trolley. There was only
+      a feeble struggle for the trolley; it was captured and hauled through the
+      scattered spectators in the square to the protection of a small impassive
+      body of regular cavalry at the opposite corner. Then quite a number of
+      people seemed to be getting excited and fighting. They appeared to be
+      vaguely fighting the foot-police, and the police seemed to be vaguely
+      pushing through them and dispersing them. The roof of a little one-story
+      shop became prominent as a centre of vigorous stone-throwing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was no sort of battle. Merely the normal inconsecutiveness of human
+      affairs had become exaggerated and pugnacious. A meeting was being
+      prevented, and the police engaged in the operation were being pelted or
+      obstructed. Mostly people were just looking on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It amounts to nothing,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Even if they held a meeting, what
+      could happen? Why does the Government try to stop it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The drifting and charging and a little booing went on for some time. Every
+      now and then some one clambered to a point of vantage, began a speech and
+      was pulled down by policemen. And at last across the confusion came an
+      idea, like a wind across a pond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The strikers were to go to the Power Station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That had the effect of a distinct move in the game. The Power Station was
+      the centre of Johannesburg's light and energy. There if anywhere it would
+      be possible to express one's disapproval of the administration, one's
+      desire to embarrass and confute it. One could stop all sorts of things
+      from the Power Station. At any rate it was a repartee to the suppression
+      of the meeting. Everybody seemed gladdened by a definite project.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham and White went with the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the
+      scattered drift of people became congested. Gliding slowly across the mass
+      came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with even its glass
+      undamaged, and then another and another. Strikers, with the happy
+      expression of men who have found something expressive to do, were
+      escorting the trams off the street. They were being meticulously careful
+      with them. Never was there less mob violence in a riot. They walked by the
+      captured cars almost deferentially, like rough men honoured by a real
+      lady's company. And when White and Benham reached the Power House the
+      marvel grew. The rioters were already in possession and going freely over
+      the whole place, and they had injured nothing. They had stopped the
+      engines, but they had not even disabled them. Here too manifestly a
+      majority of the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is the most civilized rioting,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;It isn't rioting;
+      it's drifting. Just as things drifted in Moscow. Because nobody has the
+      rudder....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What maddens me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is the democracy of the whole thing. White! I
+      HATE this modern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was there ever an
+      absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the men
+      at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the same
+      stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the conceit
+      that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just a touch of
+      aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an inkling of
+      responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all this squalor
+      and evil temper.... What does all this struggle here amount to? On one
+      side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the other; suspicion
+      everywhere....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you know, White, at bottom THEY ALL WANT TO BE DECENT!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If only they had light enough in their brains to show them how. It's such
+      a plain job they have here too, a new city, the simplest industries,
+      freedom from war, everything to make a good life for men, prosperity,
+      glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in the air. And mismanagement,
+      fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, stupidity, poison it all. A
+      squabble about working on a Saturday afternoon, a squabble embittered by
+      this universal shadow of miner's phthisis that the masters were too
+      incapable and too mean to prevent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, God!&rdquo; cried Benham, &ldquo;when will men be princes and take hold of life?
+      When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own?... Look at this
+      place! Look at this place!... The easy, accessible happiness! The manifest
+      prosperity. The newness and the sunshine. And the silly bitterness, the
+      rage, the mischief and miseries!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then: &ldquo;It's not our quarrel....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides. Life is
+      one long struggle against the incidental. I can feel my anger gathering
+      against the Government here in spite of my reason. I want to go and
+      expostulate. I have a ridiculous idea that I ought to go off to Lord
+      Gladstone or Botha and expostulate.... What good would it do? They move in
+      the magic circles of their own limitations, an official, a politician&mdash;how
+      would they put it?&mdash;'with many things to consider....'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's my weakness to be drawn into quarrels. It's a thing I have to guard
+      against....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does it all amount to? It is like a fight between navvies in a
+      tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star. It doesn't concern us....
+      Oh! it doesn't indeed concern us. It's a scuffle in the darkness, and our
+      business, the business of all brains, the only permanent good work is to
+      light up the world.... There will be mischief and hatred here and
+      suppression and then forgetfulness, and then things will go on again, a
+      little better or a little worse....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm tired of this place, White, and of all such places. I'm tired of the
+      shouting and running, the beating and shooting. I'm sick of all the
+      confusions of life's experience, which tells only of one need amidst an
+      endless multitude of distresses. I've seen my fill of wars and disputes
+      and struggles. I see now how a man may grow weary at last of life and its
+      disorders, its unreal exacting disorders, its blunders and its remorse.
+      No! I want to begin upon the realities I have made for myself. For they
+      are the realities. I want to go now to some quiet corner where I can
+      polish what I have learnt, sort out my accumulations, be undisturbed by
+      these transitory symptomatic things....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was that boy saying? They are burning the STAR office.... Well, let
+      them....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things that
+      hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the sky and
+      the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights down side
+      streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the making of greatness
+      and a new great spirit in men. All the rest of his life, he said, must be
+      given to that. He would say his thing plainly and honestly and afterwards
+      other men would say it clearly and beautifully; here it would touch a man
+      and there it would touch a man; the Invisible King in us all would find
+      himself and know himself a little in this and a little in that, and at
+      last a day would come, when fair things and fine things would rule the
+      world and such squalor as this about them would be as impossible any more
+      for men as a Stone Age Corroboree....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late or soon?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sought for some loose large measure of time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred years or
+      ten thousand years? It will never come in our lives, White. Not soon
+      enough for that. But after that everything will be soon&mdash;when one
+      comes to death then everything is at one's fingertips&mdash;I can feel
+      that greater world I shall never see as one feels the dawn coming through
+      the last darkness....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      16
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at lunch in
+      the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the burning of the
+      STAR office. The Sherborough dining-room was on the first floor, and the
+      Venetian window beside their table opened on to a verandah above a piazza.
+      As they talked they became aware of an excitement in the street below,
+      shouting and running and then a sound of wheels and the tramp of a body of
+      soldiers marching quickly. White stood up and looked. &ldquo;They're seizing the
+      stuff in the gunshops,&rdquo; he said, sitting down again. &ldquo;It's amazing they
+      haven't done it before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at Mukden
+      that had won Benham's admiration....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass smashing.
+      Then more revolver shots. &ldquo;That's at the big club at the corner, I think,&rdquo;
+       said Benham and went out upon the verandah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up and down the street mischief was afoot. Outside the Rand Club in the
+      cross street a considerable mass of people had accumulated, and was being
+      hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers. Down the street people were
+      looking in the direction of the market-place and then suddenly a rush of
+      figures flooded round the corner, first a froth of scattered individuals
+      and then a mass, a column, marching with an appearance of order and waving
+      a flag. It was a poorly disciplined body, it fringed out into a swarm of
+      sympathizers and spectators upon the side walk, and at the head of it two
+      men disputed. They seemed to be differing about the direction of the whole
+      crowd. Suddenly one smote the other with his fist, a blow that hurled him
+      sideways, and then turned with a triumphant gesture to the following
+      ranks, waving his arms in the air. He was a tall lean man, hatless and
+      collarless, greyhaired and wild-eyed. On he came, gesticulating gauntly,
+      past the hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then up the street something happened. Benham's attention was turned
+      round to it by a checking, by a kind of catch in the breath, on the part
+      of the advancing procession under the verandah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The roadway beyond the club had suddenly become clear. Across it a dozen
+      soldiers had appeared and dismounted methodically and lined out, with
+      their carbines in readiness. The mounted men at the club corner had
+      vanished, and the people there had swayed about towards this new threat.
+      Quite abruptly the miscellaneous noises of the crowd ceased. Understanding
+      seized upon every one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These soldiers were going to fire....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brown uniformed figures moved like automata; the rifle shots rang out
+      almost in one report....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a rush in the crowd towards doorways and side streets, an
+      enquiring pause, the darting back of a number of individuals into the
+      roadway and then a derisive shouting. Nobody had been hit. The soldiers
+      had fired in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is a stupid game,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Why did they fire at all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tall man who had led the mob had run out into the middle of the road.
+      His commando was a little disposed to assume a marginal position, and it
+      had to be reassured. He was near enough for Benham to see his face. For a
+      time it looked anxious and thoughtful. Then he seemed to jump to his
+      decision. He unbuttoned and opened his coat wide as if defying the
+      soldiers. &ldquo;Shoot,&rdquo; he bawled, &ldquo;Shoot, if you dare!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A little uniform movement of the soldiers answered him. The small figure
+      of the officer away there was inaudible. The coat of the man below flapped
+      like the wings of a crowing cock before a breast of dirty shirt, the
+      hoarse voice cracked with excitement, &ldquo;Shoot, if you dare. Shoot, if you
+      dare! See!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Came the metallic bang of the carbines again, and in the instant the
+      leader collapsed in the road, a sprawl of clothes, hit by half a dozen
+      bullets. It was an extraordinary effect. As though the figure had been
+      deflated. It was incredible that a moment before this thing had been a
+      man, an individual, a hesitating complicated purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; cried Benham, &ldquo;but&mdash;this is horrible!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The heap of garments lay still. The red hand that stretched out towards
+      the soldiers never twitched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The spectacular silence broke into a confusion of sounds, women shrieked,
+      men cursed, some fled, some sought a corner from which they might still
+      see, others pressed forward. &ldquo;Go for the swine!&rdquo; bawled a voice, a third
+      volley rattled over the heads of the people, and in the road below a man
+      with a rifle halted, took aim, and answered the soldiers' fire. &ldquo;Look
+      out!&rdquo; cried White who was watching the soldiers, and ducked. &ldquo;This isn't
+      in the air!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Came a straggling volley again, like a man running a metal hammer very
+      rapidly along iron corrugations, and this time people were dropping all
+      over the road. One white-faced man not a score of yards away fell with a
+      curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for some yards with blood running
+      abundantly from his neck, and fell and never stirred again. Another went
+      down upon his back clumsily in the roadway and lay wringing his hands
+      faster and faster until suddenly with a movement like a sigh they dropped
+      inert by his side. A straw-hatted youth in a flannel suit ran and stopped
+      and ran again. He seemed to be holding something red and strange to his
+      face with both hands; above them his eyes were round and anxious. Blood
+      came out between his fingers. He went right past the hotel and stumbled
+      and suddenly sprawled headlong at the opposite corner. The majority of the
+      crowd had already vanished into doorways and side streets. But there was
+      still shouting and there was still a remnant of amazed and angry men in
+      the roadway&mdash;and one or two angry women. They were not fighting.
+      Indeed they were unarmed, but if they had had weapons now they would
+      certainly have used them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is preposterous!&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;Preposterous. Those soldiers
+      are never going to shoot again! This must stop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood hesitating for a moment and then turned about and dashed for the
+      staircase. &ldquo;Good Heaven!&rdquo; cried White. &ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was going to stop that conflict very much as a man might go to stop
+      a clock that is striking unwarrantably and amazingly. He was going to stop
+      it because it annoyed his sense of human dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White hesitated for a moment and then followed, crying &ldquo;Benham!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was no arresting this last outbreak of Benham's all too
+      impatient kingship. He pushed aside a ducking German waiter who was
+      peeping through the glass doors, and rushed out of the hotel. With a
+      gesture of authority he ran forward into the middle of the street, holding
+      up his hand, in which he still held his dinner napkin clenched like a
+      bomb. White believes firmly that Benham thought he would be able to
+      dominate everything. He shouted out something about &ldquo;Foolery!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sublime indifference to
+      current things....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the carbines spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against something invisible. He spun
+      right round and fell down into a sitting position. He sat looking
+      surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After one moment of blank funk White drew out his pocket handkerchief,
+      held it arm high by way of a white flag, and ran out from the piazza of
+      the hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      17
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you hit?&rdquo; cried White dropping to his knees and making himself as
+      compact as possible. &ldquo;Benham!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought answered in a strange voice, a
+      whisper into which a whistling note had been mixed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was stupid of me to come out here. Not my quarrel. Faults on both
+      sides. And now I can't get up. I will sit here a moment and pull myself
+      together. Perhaps I'm&mdash;I must be shot. But it seemed to come&mdash;inside
+      me.... If I should be hurt. Am I hurt?... Will you see to that book of
+      mine, White? It's odd. A kind of faintness.... What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will see after your book,&rdquo; said White and glanced at his hand because
+      it felt wet, and was astonished to discover it bright red. He forgot about
+      himself then, and the fresh flight of bullets down the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate effect of this blood was that he said something more about
+      the book, a promise, a definite promise. He could never recall his exact
+      words, but their intention was binding. He conveyed his absolute
+      acquiescence with Benham's wishes whatever they were. His life for that
+      moment was unreservedly at his friend's disposal....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White never knew if his promise was heard. Benham had stopped speaking
+      quite abruptly with that &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared in front of him with a doubtful expression, like a man who is
+      going to be sick, and then, in an instant, every muscle seemed to give
+      way, he shuddered, his head flopped, and White held a dead man in his
+      arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE END <br /><br />
+    </p>
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 1138 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #1138 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1138)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Research Magnificent
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Posting Date: August 3, 2008 [EBook #1138]
+Release Date: December, 1997
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Donald Lainson
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+(1915)
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     THE PRELUDE
+
+           ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+
+
+     THE STORY
+
+       I.  THE BOY GROWS UP
+
+      II.  THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN
+
+     III.  AMANDA
+
+      IV.  THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON
+
+       V.  THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY
+
+      VI.  THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+
+
+
+
+THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+
+
+
+
+THE PRELUDE
+
+
+
+
+ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+
+
+
+1
+
+The story of William Porphyry Benham is the story of a man who was led
+into adventure by an idea. It was an idea that took possession of his
+imagination quite early in life, it grew with him and changed with him,
+it interwove at last completely with his being. His story is its story.
+It was traceably germinating in the schoolboy; it was manifestly present
+in his mind at the very last moment of his adventurous life. He belonged
+to that fortunate minority who are independent of daily necessities, so
+that he was free to go about the world under its direction. It led him
+far. It led him into situations that bordered upon the fantastic, it
+made him ridiculous, it came near to making him sublime. And this idea
+of his was of such a nature that in several aspects he could document
+it. Its logic forced him to introspection and to the making of a record.
+
+An idea that can play so large a part in a life must necessarily have
+something of the complication and protean quality of life itself. It is
+not to be stated justly in any formula, it is not to be rendered by an
+epigram. As well one might show a man's skeleton for his portrait. Yet,
+essentially, Benham's idea was simple. He had an incurable, an almost
+innate persuasion that he had to live life nobly and thoroughly. His
+commoner expression for that thorough living is “the aristocratic life.”
+ But by “aristocratic” he meant something very different from the
+quality of a Russian prince, let us say, or an English peer. He meant an
+intensity, a clearness.... Nobility for him was to get something out of
+his individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a splendour--it is a thing
+easier to understand than to say.
+
+One might hesitate to call this idea “innate,” and yet it comes soon
+into a life when it comes at all. In Benham's case we might trace it
+back to the Day Nursery at Seagate, we might detect it stirring already
+at the petticoat stage, in various private struttings and valiant
+dreamings with a helmet of pasteboard and a white-metal sword. We have
+most of us been at least as far as that with Benham. And we have
+died like Horatius, slaying our thousands for our country, or we have
+perished at the stake or faced the levelled muskets of the firing
+party--“No, do not bandage my eyes”--because we would not betray the
+secret path that meant destruction to our city. But with Benham the
+vein was stronger, and it increased instead of fading out as he grew
+to manhood. It was less obscured by those earthy acquiescences, those
+discretions, that saving sense of proportion, which have made most of
+us so satisfactorily what we are. “Porphyry,” his mother had discovered
+before he was seventeen, “is an excellent boy, a brilliant boy, but, I
+begin to see, just a little unbalanced.”
+
+The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the story of him, is that.
+
+Most of us are--balanced; in spite of occasional reveries we do come to
+terms with the limitations of life, with those desires and dreams and
+discretions that, to say the least of it, qualify our nobility, we take
+refuge in our sense of humour and congratulate ourselves on a certain
+amiable freedom from priggishness or presumption, but for Benham that
+easy declension to a humorous acceptance of life as it is did not occur.
+He found his limitations soon enough; he was perpetually
+rediscovering them, but out of these interments of the spirit he rose
+again--remarkably. When we others have decided that, to be plain about
+it, we are not going to lead the noble life at all, that the thing is
+too ambitious and expensive even to attempt, we have done so because
+there were other conceptions of existence that were good enough for us,
+we decided that instead of that glorious impossible being of ourselves,
+we would figure in our own eyes as jolly fellows, or sly dogs, or sane,
+sound, capable men or brilliant successes, and so forth--practicable
+things. For Benham, exceptionally, there were not these practicable
+things. He blundered, he fell short of himself, he had--as you will
+be told--some astonishing rebuffs, but they never turned him aside for
+long. He went by nature for this preposterous idea of nobility as a
+linnet hatched in a cage will try to fly.
+
+And when he discovered--and in this he was assisted not a little by his
+friend at his elbow--when he discovered that Nobility was not the simple
+thing he had at first supposed it to be, he set himself in a mood only
+slightly disconcerted to the discovery of Nobility. When it dawned upon
+him, as it did, that one cannot be noble, so to speak, IN VACUO, he set
+himself to discover a Noble Society. He began with simple beliefs and
+fine attitudes and ended in a conscious research. If he could not get
+through by a stride, then it followed that he must get through by a
+climb. He spent the greater part of his life studying and experimenting
+in the noble possibilities of man. He never lost his absurd faith in
+that conceivable splendour. At first it was always just round the corner
+or just through the wood; to the last it seemed still but a little way
+beyond the distant mountains.
+
+For this reason this story has been called THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. It
+was a real research, it was documented. In the rooms in Westhaven Street
+that at last were as much as one could call his home, he had accumulated
+material for--one hesitates to call it a book--let us say it was an
+analysis of, a guide to the noble life. There after his tragic death
+came his old friend White, the journalist and novelist, under a promise,
+and found these papers; he found them to the extent of a crammed
+bureau, half a score of patent files quite distended and a writing-table
+drawer-full, and he was greatly exercised to find them. They were,
+White declares, they are still after much experienced handling, an
+indigestible aggregation. On this point White is very assured. When
+Benham thought he was gathering together a book he was dreaming, White
+says. There is no book in it....
+
+Perhaps too, one might hazard, Benham was dreaming when he thought the
+noble life a human possibility. Perhaps man, like the ape and the hyaena
+and the tapeworm and many other of God's necessary but less attractive
+creatures, is not for such exalted ends. That doubt never seems to have
+got a lodgment in Benham's skull; though at times one might suppose it
+the basis of White's thought. You will find in all Benham's story,
+if only it can be properly told, now subdued, now loud and amazed and
+distressed, but always traceable, this startled, protesting question,
+“BUT WHY THE DEVIL AREN'T WE?” As though necessarily we ought to be.
+He never faltered in his persuasion that behind the dingy face of this
+world, the earthy stubbornness, the baseness and dulness of himself
+and all of us, lurked the living jewels of heaven, the light of glory,
+things unspeakable. At first it seemed to him that one had only just to
+hammer and will, and at the end, after a life of willing and hammering,
+he was still convinced there was something, something in the nature of
+an Open Sesame, perhaps a little more intricate than one had supposed
+at first, a little more difficult to secure, but still in that nature,
+which would suddenly roll open for mankind the magic cave of the
+universe, that precious cave at the heart of all things, in which one
+must believe.
+
+And then life--life would be the wonder it so perplexingly just
+isn't....
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Benham did not go about the world telling people of this consuming
+research. He was not the prophet or preacher of his idea. It was too
+living and intricate and uncertain a part of him to speak freely about.
+It was his secret self; to expose it casually would have shamed him. He
+drew all sorts of reserves about him, he wore his manifest imperfections
+turned up about him like an overcoat in bitter wind. He was content
+to be inexplicable. His thoughts led him to the conviction that this
+magnificent research could not be, any more than any other research
+can be, a solitary enterprise, but he delayed expression; in a mighty
+writing and stowing away of these papers he found a relief from the
+unpleasant urgency to confess and explain himself prematurely. So that
+White, though he knew Benham with the intimacy of an old schoolfellow
+who had renewed his friendship, and had shared his last days and been a
+witness of his death, read the sheets of manuscript often with surprise
+and with a sense of added elucidation.
+
+And, being also a trained maker of books, White as he read was more
+and more distressed that an accumulation so interesting should be so
+entirely unshaped for publication. “But this will never make a book,”
+ said White with a note of personal grievance. His hasty promise in their
+last moments together had bound him, it seemed, to a task he now found
+impossible. He would have to work upon it tremendously; and even then he
+did not see how it could be done.
+
+This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a
+confession, not a diary. It was--nothing definable. It went into no
+conceivable covers. It was just, White decided, a proliferation. A vast
+proliferation. It wanted even a title. There were signs that Benham had
+intended to call it THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE, and that he had tried at some
+other time the title of AN ESSAY ON ARISTOCRACY. Moreover, it would
+seem that towards the end he had been disposed to drop the word
+“aristocratic” altogether, and adopt some such phrase as THE LARGER
+LIFE. Once it was LIFE SET FREE. He had fallen away more and more from
+nearly everything that one associates with aristocracy--at the end only
+its ideals of fearlessness and generosity remained.
+
+Of all these titles THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE seemed at first most like
+a clue to White. Benham's erratic movements, his sudden impulses, his
+angers, his unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange places, and
+his lapses into what had seemed to be pure adventurousness, could all be
+put into system with that. Before White had turned over three pages of
+the great fascicle of manuscript that was called Book Two, he had found
+the word “Bushido” written with a particularly flourishing capital
+letter and twice repeated. “That was inevitable,” said White with the
+comforting regret one feels for a friend's banalities. “And it dates...
+[unreadable] this was early....”
+
+“Modern aristocracy, the new aristocracy,” he read presently, “has still
+to be discovered and understood. This is the necessary next step for
+mankind. As far as possible I will discover and understand it, and as
+far as I know it I will be it. This is the essential disposition of my
+mind. God knows I have appetites and sloths and habits and blindnesses,
+but so far as it is in my power to release myself I will escape to
+this....”
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+White sat far into the night and for several nights turning over papers
+and rummaging in untidy drawers. Memories came back to him of his dead
+friend and pieced themselves together with other memories and joined
+on to scraps in this writing. Bold yet convincing guesses began to leap
+across the gaps. A story shaped itself....
+
+The story began with the schoolfellow he had known at Minchinghampton
+School.
+
+Benham had come up from his father's preparatory school at Seagate. He
+had been a boy reserved rather than florid in his acts and manners, a
+boy with a pale face, incorrigible hair and brown eyes that went dark
+and deep with excitement. Several times White had seen him excited, and
+when he was excited Benham was capable of tensely daring things. On one
+occasion he had insisted upon walking across a field in which was an
+aggressive bull. It had been put there to prevent the boys taking
+a short cut to the swimming place. It had bellowed tremendously and
+finally charged him. He had dodged it and got away; at the time it had
+seemed an immense feat to White and the others who were safely up
+the field. He had walked to the fence, risking a second charge by his
+deliberation. Then he had sat on the fence and declared his intention
+of always crossing the field so long as the bull remained there. He had
+said this with white intensity, he had stopped abruptly in mid-sentence,
+and then suddenly he had dropped to the ground, clutched the fence,
+struggled with heaving shoulders, and been sick.
+
+The combination of apparently stout heart and manifestly weak stomach
+had exercised the Minchinghampton intelligence profoundly.
+
+On one or two other occasions Benham had shown courage of the same
+rather screwed-up sort. He showed it not only in physical but in mental
+things. A boy named Prothero set a fashion of religious discussion
+in the school, and Benham, after some self-examination, professed an
+atheistical republicanism rather in the manner of Shelley. This brought
+him into open conflict with Roddles, the History Master. Roddles had
+discovered these theological controversies in some mysterious way, and
+he took upon himself to talk at Benham and Prothero. He treated them to
+the common misapplication of that fool who “hath said in his heart there
+is no God.” He did not perceive there was any difference between the
+fool who says a thing in his heart and one who says it in the dormitory.
+He revived that delectable anecdote of the Eton boy who professed
+disbelief and was at once “soundly flogged” by his head master. “Years
+afterwards that boy came back to thank ----”
+
+“Gurr,” said Prothero softly. “STEW--ard!”
+
+“Your turn next, Benham,” whispered an orthodox controversialist.
+
+“Good Lord! I'd like to see him,” said Benham with a forced loudness
+that could scarcely be ignored.
+
+The subsequent controversy led to an interview with the head. From
+it Benham emerged more whitely strung up than ever. “He said he would
+certainly swish me if I deserved it, and I said I would certainly kill
+him if he did.”
+
+“And then?”
+
+“He told me to go away and think it over. Said he would preach about
+it next Sunday.... Well, a swishing isn't a likely thing anyhow. But
+I would.... There isn't a master here I'd stand a thrashing from--not
+one.... And because I choose to say what I think!... I'd run amuck.”
+
+For a week or so the school was exhilarated by a vain and ill-concealed
+hope that the head might try it just to see if Benham would. It was
+tantalizingly within the bounds of possibility....
+
+These incidents came back to White's mind as he turned over the
+newspapers in the upper drawer of the bureau. The drawer was labelled
+“Fear--the First Limitation,” and the material in it was evidently
+designed for the opening volume of the great unfinished book. Indeed, a
+portion of it was already arranged and written up.
+
+As White read through this manuscript he was reminded of a score of
+schoolboy discussions Benham and he and Prothero had had together. Here
+was the same old toughness of mind, a kind of intellectual hardihood,
+that had sometimes shocked his schoolfellows. Benham had been one of
+those boys who do not originate ideas very freely, but who go out to
+them with a fierce sincerity. He believed and disbelieved with emphasis.
+Prothero had first set him doubting, but it was Benham's own temperament
+took him on to denial. His youthful atheism had been a matter for secret
+consternation in White. White did not believe very much in God even
+then, but this positive disbelieving frightened him. It was going
+too far. There had been a terrible moment in the dormitory, during a
+thunderstorm, a thunderstorm so vehement that it had awakened them
+all, when Latham, the humourist and a quietly devout boy, had suddenly
+challenged Benham to deny his Maker.
+
+“NOW say you don't believe in God?”
+
+Benham sat up in bed and repeated his negative faith, while little
+Hopkins, the Bishop's son, being less certain about the accuracy of
+Providence than His aim, edged as far as he could away from Benham's
+cubicle and rolled his head in his bedclothes.
+
+“And anyhow,” said Benham, when it was clear that he was not to be
+struck dead forthwith, “you show a poor idea of your God to think he'd
+kill a schoolboy for honest doubt. Even old Roddles--”
+
+“I can't listen to you,” cried Latham the humourist, “I can't listen to
+you. It's--HORRIBLE.”
+
+“Well, who began it?” asked Benham.
+
+A flash of lightning lit the dormitory and showed him to White
+white-faced and ablaze with excitement, sitting up with the bed-clothes
+about him. “Oh WOW!” wailed the muffled voice of little Hopkins as the
+thunder burst like a giant pistol overhead, and he buried his head still
+deeper in the bedclothes and gave way to unappeasable grief.
+
+Latham's voice came out of the darkness. “This ATHEISM that you and
+Billy Prothero have brought into the school--”
+
+He started violently at another vivid flash, and every one remained
+silent, waiting for the thunder....
+
+But White remembered no more of the controversy because he had made a
+frightful discovery that filled and blocked his mind. Every time the
+lightning flashed, there was a red light in Benham's eyes....
+
+It was only three days after when Prothero discovered exactly the same
+phenomenon in the School House boothole and talked of cats and cattle,
+that White's confidence in their friend was partially restored....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+“Fear, the First Limitation”--his title indicated the spirit of Benham's
+opening book very clearly. His struggle with fear was the very beginning
+of his soul's history. It continued to the end. He had hardly decided to
+lead the noble life before he came bump against the fact that he was
+a physical coward. He felt fear acutely. “Fear,” he wrote, “is the
+foremost and most persistent of the shepherding powers that keep us
+in the safe fold, that drive us back to the beaten track and comfort
+and--futility. The beginning of all aristocracy is the subjugation of
+fear.”
+
+At first the struggle was so great that he hated fear without any
+qualification; he wanted to abolish it altogether.
+
+“When I was a boy,” he writes, “I thought I would conquer fear for good
+and all, and never more be troubled by it. But it is not to be done in
+that way. One might as well dream of having dinner for the rest of one's
+life. Each time and always I have found that it has to be conquered
+afresh. To this day I fear, little things as well as big things. I have
+to grapple with some little dread every day--urge myself.... Just as
+I have to wash and shave myself every day.... I believe it is so with
+every one, but it is difficult to be sure; few men who go into dangers
+care very much to talk about fear....”
+
+Later Benham found some excuses for fear, came even to dealings with
+fear. He never, however, admits that this universal instinct is any
+better than a kindly but unintelligent nurse from whose fostering
+restraints it is man's duty to escape. Discretion, he declared, must
+remain; a sense of proportion, an “adequacy of enterprise,” but the
+discretion of an aristocrat is in his head, a tactical detail, it has
+nothing to do with this visceral sinking, this ebb in the nerves. “From
+top to bottom, the whole spectrum of fear is bad, from panic fear at
+one extremity down to that mere disinclination for enterprise, that
+reluctance and indolence which is its lowest phase. These are things of
+the beast, these are for creatures that have a settled environment, a
+life history, that spin in a cage of instincts. But man is a beast of
+that kind no longer, he has left his habitat, he goes out to limitless
+living....”
+
+This idea of man going out into new things, leaving securities, habits,
+customs, leaving his normal life altogether behind him, underlay all
+Benham's aristocratic conceptions. And it was natural that he
+should consider fear as entirely inconvenient, treat it indeed with
+ingratitude, and dwell upon the immense liberations that lie beyond for
+those who will force themselves through its remonstrances....
+
+Benham confessed his liability to fear quite freely in these notes. His
+fear of animals was ineradicable. He had had an overwhelming dread of
+bears until he was twelve or thirteen, the child's irrational dread
+of impossible bears, bears lurking under the bed and in the evening
+shadows. He confesses that even up to manhood he could not cross a
+field containing cattle without keeping a wary eye upon them--his bull
+adventure rather increased than diminished that disposition--he hated a
+strange dog at his heels and would manoeuvre himself as soon as possible
+out of reach of the teeth or heels of a horse. But the peculiar dread of
+his childhood was tigers. Some gaping nursemaid confronted him suddenly
+with a tiger in a cage in the menagerie annexe of a circus. “My small
+mind was overwhelmed.”
+
+“I had never thought,” White read, “that a tiger was much larger than
+a St. Bernard dog.... This great creature!... I could not believe any
+hunter would attack such a monster except by stealth and with weapons of
+enormous power....
+
+“He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and
+looked over my head with yellow eyes--at some phantom far away. Every
+now and then he snarled. The contempt of his detestable indifference
+sank deeper and deeper into my soul. I knew that were the cage to vanish
+I should stand there motionless, his helpless prey. I knew that were he
+at large in the same building with me I should be too terror-stricken
+to escape him. At the foot of a ladder leading clear to escape I should
+have awaited him paralyzed. At last I gripped my nurse's hand. 'Take me
+away,' I whispered.
+
+“In my dreams that night he stalked me. I made my frozen flight from
+him, I slammed a door on him, and he thrust his paw through a panel
+as though it had been paper and clawed for me. The paw got longer and
+longer....
+
+“I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.
+
+“I remember that he took me in his arms.
+
+“'It's only a big sort of pussy, Poff,' he said. 'FELIS TIGRIS. FELIS,
+you know, means cat.'
+
+“But I knew better. I was in no mood then for my father's insatiable
+pedagoguery.
+
+“'And my little son mustn't be a coward.'...
+
+“After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers alone.
+
+“For years the thought of that tiger's immensity haunted my mind. In
+my dreams I cowered before it a thousand times; in the dusk it rarely
+failed me. On the landing on my way to bed there was a patch of darkness
+beyond a chest that became a lurking horror for me, and sometimes the
+door of my father's bedroom would stand open and there was a long buff
+and crimson-striped shape, by day indeed an ottoman, but by night--.
+Could an ottoman crouch and stir in the flicker of a passing candle?
+Could an ottoman come after you noiselessly, and so close that you could
+not even turn round upon it? No!”
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+When Benham was already seventeen and, as he supposed, hardened against
+his fear of beasts, his friend Prothero gave him an account of the
+killing of an old labouring man by a stallion which had escaped out of
+its stable. The beast had careered across a field, leapt a hedge and
+come upon its victim suddenly. He had run a few paces and stopped,
+trying to defend his head with the horse rearing over him. It beat him
+down with two swift blows of its fore hoofs, one, two, lifted him up in
+its long yellow teeth and worried him as a terrier does a rat--the poor
+old wretch was still able to make a bleating sound at that--dropped him,
+trampled and kicked him as he tried to crawl away, and went on trampling
+and battering him until he was no more than a bloody inhuman bundle of
+clothes and mire. For more than half an hour this continued, and then
+its animal rage was exhausted and it desisted, and went and grazed at
+a little distance from this misshapen, hoof-marked, torn, and muddy
+remnant of a man. No one it seems but a horror-stricken child knew what
+was happening....
+
+This picture of human indignity tortured Benham's imagination much more
+than it tortured the teller of the tale. It filled him with shame and
+horror. For three or four years every detail of that circumstantial
+narrative seemed unforgettable. A little lapse from perfect health and
+the obsession returned. He could not endure the neighing of horses: when
+he saw horses galloping in a field with him his heart stood still. And
+all his life thereafter he hated horses.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+A different sort of fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due to a
+certain clumsiness and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable places.
+There he was more definitely balanced between the hopelessly rash and
+the pitifully discreet.
+
+He had written an account of a private struggle between himself and a
+certain path of planks and rock edges called the Bisse of Leysin. This
+happened in his adolescence. He had had a bad attack of influenza and
+his doctor had sent him to a little hotel--the only hotel it was in
+those days--at Montana in Valais. There, later, when he had picked up
+his strength, his father was to join him and take him mountaineering,
+that second-rate mountaineering which is so dear to dons and
+schoolmasters. When the time came he was ready for that, but he had had
+his experiences. He had gone through a phase of real cowardice. He was
+afraid, he confessed, before even he reached Montana; he was afraid of
+the steepness of the mountains. He had to drive ten or twelve miles
+up and up the mountain-side, a road of innumerable hairpin bends and
+precipitous banks, the horse was gaunt and ugly with a disposition to
+shy, and he confesses he clutched the side of the vehicle and speculated
+how he should jump if presently the whole turnout went tumbling over....
+
+“And afterwards I dreamt dreams of precipices. I made strides over
+precipices, I fell and fell with a floating swiftness towards remote
+valleys, I was assailed by eagles upon a perilous ledge that crumbled
+away and left me clinging by my nails to nothing.”
+
+The Bisse of Leysin is one of those artificial water-courses which bring
+water from some distant source to pastures that have an insufficient
+or uncertain supply. It is a little better known than most because of
+a certain exceptional boldness in its construction; for a distance of a
+few score yards it runs supported by iron staples across the front of
+a sheer precipice, and for perhaps half a mile it hangs like an eyebrow
+over nearly or quite vertical walls of pine-set rock. Beside it, on
+the outer side of it, runs a path, which becomes an offhand gangway
+of planking at the overhanging places. At one corner, which gives the
+favourite picture postcard from Montana, the rocks project so sharply
+above the water that the passenger on the gangway must crouch down upon
+the bending plank as he walks. There is no hand-hold at all.
+
+A path from Montana takes one over a pine-clad spur and down a
+precipitous zig-zag upon the middle of the Bisse, and thither Benham
+came, fascinated by the very fact that here was something of which the
+mere report frightened him. He had to walk across the cold clear rush
+of the Bisse upon a pine log, and then he found himself upon one of the
+gentler interludes of the Bisse track. It was a scrambling path nearly
+two feet wide, and below it were slopes, but not so steep as to terrify.
+At a vast distance below he saw through tree-stems and blue haze a
+twisted strand of bright whiteness, the river that joins the Rhone at
+Sion. It looped about and passed out of sight remotely beneath his feet.
+He turned to the right, and came to a corner that overhung a precipice.
+He craned his head round this corner and saw the evil place of the
+picture-postcards.
+
+He remained for a long time trying to screw himself up to walk along the
+jagged six-inch edge of rock between cliff and torrent into which the
+path has shrunken, to the sagging plank under the overhanging rock
+beyond.
+
+He could not bring himself to do that.
+
+“It happened that close to the corner a large lump of rock and earth
+was breaking away, a cleft was opening, so that presently, it seemed
+possible at any moment, the mass would fall headlong into the blue deeps
+below. This impending avalanche was not in my path along the Bisse, it
+was no sort of danger to me, but in some way its insecurity gave a final
+touch to my cowardice. I could not get myself round that corner.”
+
+He turned away. He went and examined the planks in the other direction,
+and these he found less forbidding. He crossed one precipitous place,
+with a fall of twoscore feet or less beneath him, and found worse ahead.
+There also he managed. A third place was still more disagreeable.
+The plank was worn and thin, and sagged under him. He went along it
+supporting himself against the rock above the Bisse with an extended
+hand. Halfway the rock fell back, so that there was nothing whatever
+to hold. He stopped, hesitating whether he should go back--but on
+this plank there was no going back because no turning round seemed
+practicable. While he was still hesitating there came a helpful
+intervention. Behind him he saw a peasant appearing and disappearing
+behind trees and projecting rock masses, and coming across the previous
+plank at a vigorous trot....
+
+Under the stimulus of a spectator Benham got to the end of this third
+place without much trouble. Then very politely he stood aside for the
+expert to go ahead so that he could follow at his own pace.
+
+There were, however, more difficulties yet to come, and a disagreeable
+humiliation. That confounded peasant developed a parental solicitude.
+After each crossing he waited, and presently began to offer advice and
+encouragement. At last came a place where everything was overhanging,
+where the Bisse was leaking, and the plank wet and slippery. The water
+ran out of the leak near the brim of the wooden channel and fell in a
+long shivering thread of silver. THERE WAS NO SOUND OF ITS FALL. It just
+fell--into a void. Benham wished he had not noted that. He groaned, but
+faced the plank; he knew this would be the slowest affair of all.
+
+The peasant surveyed him from the further side.
+
+“Don't be afraid!” cried the peasant in his clumsy Valaisian French,
+and returned, returning along the plank that seemed quite sufficiently
+loaded without him, extending a charitable hand.
+
+“Damn!” whispered Benham, but he took the hand.
+
+Afterwards, rather ignobly, he tried to explain in his public-school
+French. “Pas de peur,” he said. “Pas de peur. Mais la tete, n'a pas
+l'habitude.”
+
+The peasant, failing to understand, assured him again that there was no
+danger.
+
+(“Damn!”)
+
+Benham was led over all the other planks, he was led as if he was an
+old lady crossing a glacier. He was led into absolute safety, and
+shamefacedly he rewarded his guide. Then he went a little way and sat
+down, swore softly, and watched the honest man go striding and plunging
+down towards Lens until he was out of sight.
+
+“Now,” said Benham to himself, “if I do not go back along the planks my
+secret honour is gone for ever.”
+
+He told himself that he had not a good head, that he was not well, that
+the sun was setting and the light no longer good, that he had a very
+good chance indeed of getting killed. Then it came to him suddenly as a
+clear and simple truth, as something luminously plain, that it is better
+to get killed than go away defeated by such fears and unsteadiness as
+his. The change came into his mind as if a white light were suddenly
+turned on--where there had been nothing but shadows and darkness. He
+rose to his feet and went swiftly and intently the whole way back, going
+with a kind of temperate recklessness, and, because he was no longer
+careful, easily. He went on beyond his starting place toward the corner,
+and did that supreme bit, to and fro, that bit where the lump was
+falling away, and he had to crouch, as gaily as the rest. Then he
+recrossed the Bisse upon the pine log, clambered up through the pines to
+the crest, and returned through the meadows to his own hotel.
+
+After that he should have slept the sleep of contentment, but instead
+he had quite dreadful nightmares, of hanging in frozen fear above
+incredible declivities, of ill-aimed leaps across chasms to slippery
+footholds, of planks that swayed and broke suddenly in the middle and
+headed him down and down....
+
+The next day in the sunshine he walked the Bisse again with those dreams
+like trailing mists in his mind, and by comparison the path of the Bisse
+was nothing, it was like walking along a kerbstone, it was an exercise
+for young ladies....
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+In his younger days Benham had regarded Fear as a shameful secret and as
+a thing to be got rid of altogether. It seemed to him that to feel fear
+was to fall short of aristocracy, and in spite of the deep dreads
+and disgusts that haunted his mind, he set about the business of its
+subjugation as if it were a spiritual amputation. But as he emerged
+from the egotism of adolescence he came to realize that this was
+too comprehensive an operation; every one feels fear, and your true
+aristocrat is not one who has eliminated, but one who controls or
+ignores it. Brave men are men who do things when they are afraid to do
+them, just as Nelson, even when he was seasick, and he was frequently
+seasick, was still master of the sea. Benham developed two leading ideas
+about fear; one that it is worse at the first onset, and far worse than
+any real experience, and the other that fear is essentially a social
+instinct. He set himself upon these lines to study--what can we call
+it?--the taming of fear, the nature, care, and management of fear....
+
+“Fear is very like pain in this, that it is a deterrent thing. It is
+superficial. Just as a man's skin is infinitely more sensitive than
+anything inside.... Once you have forced yourself or have been forced
+through the outward fear into vivid action or experience, you feel very
+little. The worst moment is before things happen. Rowe, the African
+sportsman, told me that he had seen cowardice often enough in the
+presence of lions, but he had never seen any one actually charged by a
+lion who did not behave well. I have heard the same thing of many sorts
+of dangers.
+
+“I began to suspect this first in the case of falling or jumping down.
+Giddiness may be an almost intolerable torture, and falling nothing of
+the sort. I once saw the face of an old man who had flung himself out
+of a high window in Rome, and who had been killed instantly on the
+pavement; it was not simply a serene face, it was glad, exalted. I
+suspect that when we have broken the shell of fear, falling may be
+delightful. Jumping down is, after all, only a steeper tobogganing, and
+tobogganing a milder jumping down. Always I used to funk at the top
+of the Cresta run. I suffered sometimes almost intolerably; I found
+it almost impossible to get away. The first ten yards was like being
+slashed open with a sharp sword. But afterwards there was nothing but
+joyful thrills. All instinct, too, fought against me when I tried high
+diving. I managed it, and began to like it. I had to give it up because
+of my ears, but not until I had established the habit of stepping
+through that moment of disinclination.
+
+“I was Challoner's passenger when he was killed at Sheerness. That was
+a queer unexpected experience, you may have supposed it an agony of
+terror, but indeed there was no fear in it at all. At any rate, I do not
+remember a moment of fear; it has gone clean out of my memory if ever it
+was there. We were swimming high and fast, three thousand feet or so, in
+a clear, sweet air over the town of Sheerness. The river, with a
+string of battleships, was far away to the west of us, and the endless
+grey-blue flats of the Thames to the north. The sun was low behind a
+bank of cloud. I was watching a motor-car, which seemed to be crawling
+slowly enough, though, no doubt, it was making a respectable pace,
+between two hedges down below. It is extraordinary how slowly everything
+seems to be going when one sees it from such an height.
+
+“Then the left wing of the monoplane came up like a door that slams,
+some wires whistled past my head, and one whipped off my helmet, and
+then, with the seat slipping away from me, down we went. I snatched
+unavailingly for the helmet, and then gripped the sides. It was like
+dropping in a boat suddenly into the trough of a wave--and going on
+dropping. We were both strapped, and I got my feet against the side and
+clung to the locked second wheel.
+
+“The sensation was as though something like an intermittent electric
+current was pouring through me. It's a ridiculous image to use, I can't
+justify it, but it was as if I was having cold blue light squirted
+through every pore of my being. There was an astonishment, a feeling
+of confirmation. 'Of course these things do happen sometimes,' I told
+myself. I don't remember that Challoner looked round or said anything at
+all. I am not sure that I looked at him....
+
+“There seemed to be a long interval of intensely excited curiosity, and
+I remember thinking, 'Lord, but we shall come a smash in a minute!'
+Far ahead I saw the grey sheds of Eastchurch and people strolling
+about apparently unaware of our disaster. There was a sudden silence as
+Challoner stopped the engine....
+
+“But the point I want to insist upon is that I did not feel afraid. I
+was simply enormously, terribly INTERESTED....
+
+“There came a tremendous jolt and a lunge, and we were both tipped
+forward, so that we were hanging forehead down by our straps, and it
+looked as if the sheds were in the sky, then I saw nothing but sky, then
+came another vast swerve, and we were falling sideways, sideways....
+
+“I was altogether out of breath and PHYSICALLY astonished, and I
+remember noting quite intelligently as we hit the ground how the green
+grass had an effect of POURING OUT in every direction from below us....
+
+“Then I remember a jerk and a feeling that I was flying up again. I was
+astonished by a tremendous popping--fabric, wires, everything seemed
+going pop, pop, pop, like a machine-gun, and then came a flash of
+intense pain as my arm crumpled up. It was quite impersonal pain. As
+impersonal as seeing intense colour. SPLINTERS! I remember the word came
+into my head instantly. I remember that very definitely.
+
+“I thought, I suppose, my arm was in splinters. Or perhaps of the scraps
+and ends of rods and wires flying about us. It is curious that while I
+remember the word I cannot recall the idea....
+
+“When I became conscious again the chief thing present in my mind was
+that all those fellows round were young soldiers who wouldn't at all
+understand bad behaviour. My arm was--orchestral, but still far from
+being real suffering IN me. Also I wanted to know what Challoner had
+got. They wouldn't understand my questions, and then I twisted round and
+saw from the negligent way his feet came out from under the engine that
+he must be dead. And dark red stains with bright red froth--
+
+“Of course!
+
+“There again the chief feeling was a sense of oddity. I wasn't sorry for
+him any more than I was for myself.
+
+“It seemed to me that it was all right with us both, remarkable, vivid,
+but all right....”
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+“But though there is little or no fear in an aeroplane, even when it
+is smashing up, there is fear about aeroplanes. There is something that
+says very urgently, 'Don't,' to the man who looks up into the sky. It
+is very interesting to note how at a place like Eastchurch or Brooklands
+the necessary discretion trails the old visceral feeling with it,
+and how men will hang about, ready to go up, resolved to go up, but
+delaying. Men of indisputable courage will get into a state between
+dread and laziness, and waste whole hours of flying weather on any
+excuse or no excuse. Once they are up that inhibition vanishes. The man
+who was delaying and delaying half an hour ago will now be cutting the
+most venturesome capers in the air. Few men are in a hurry to get down
+again. I mean that quite apart from the hesitation of landing, they like
+being up there.”
+
+Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory.
+
+“Fear, you see, is the inevitable janitor, but it is not the ruler of
+experience. That is what I am driving at in all this. The bark of danger
+is worse than its bite. Inside the portals there may be events and
+destruction, but terror stays defeated at the door. It may be that when
+that old man was killed by a horse the child who watched suffered more
+than he did....
+
+“I am sure that was so....”
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+As White read Benham's notes and saw how his argument drove on, he was
+reminded again and again of those schoolboy days and Benham's hardihood,
+and his own instinctive unreasonable reluctance to follow those gallant
+intellectual leads. If fear is an ancient instinctive boundary that the
+modern life, the aristocratic life, is bound to ignore and transcend,
+may this not also be the case with pain? We do a little adventure into
+the “life beyond fear”; may we not also think of adventuring into the
+life beyond pain? Is pain any saner a warning than fear? May not pain
+just as much as fear keep us from possible and splendid things? But why
+ask a question that is already answered in principle in every dentist's
+chair? Benham's idea, however, went much further than that, he was
+clearly suggesting that in pain itself, pain endured beyond a certain
+pitch, there might come pleasure again, an intensity of sensation
+that might have the colour of delight. He betrayed a real anxiety to
+demonstrate this possibility, he had the earnestness of a man who is
+sensible of dissentient elements within. He hated the thought of
+pain even more than he hated fear. His arguments did not in the least
+convince White, who stopped to poke the fire and assure himself of his
+own comfort in the midst of his reading.
+
+Young people and unseasoned people, Benham argued, are apt to imagine
+that if fear is increased and carried to an extreme pitch it becomes
+unbearable, one will faint or die; given a weak heart, a weak artery or
+any such structural defect and that may well happen, but it is just as
+possible that as the stimulation increases one passes through a brief
+ecstasy of terror to a new sane world, exalted but as sane as normal
+existence. There is the calmness of despair. Benham had made some notes
+to enforce this view, of the observed calm behaviour of men already
+hopelessly lost, men on sinking ships, men going to execution, men
+already maimed and awaiting the final stroke, but for the most part
+these were merely references to books and periodicals. In exactly the
+same way, he argued, we exaggerate the range of pain as if it were
+limitless. We think if we are unthinking that it passes into agony and
+so beyond endurance to destruction. It probably does nothing of the
+kind. Benham compared pain to the death range of the electric current.
+At a certain voltage it thrills, at a greater it torments and convulses,
+at a still greater it kills. But at enormous voltages, as Tesla was
+the first to demonstrate, it does no injury. And following on this came
+memoranda on the recorded behaviour of martyrs, on the self-torture of
+Hindoo ascetics, of the defiance of Red Indian prisoners.
+
+“These things,” Benham had written, “are much more horrible when one
+considers them from the point of view of an easy-chair”;--White gave
+an assenting nod--“ARE THEY REALLY HORRIBLE AT ALL? Is it possible that
+these charred and slashed and splintered persons, those Indians hanging
+from hooks, those walkers in the fiery furnace, have had glimpses
+through great windows that were worth the price they paid for them?
+Haven't we allowed those checks and barriers that are so important a
+restraint upon childish enterprise, to creep up into and distress and
+distort adult life?...
+
+“The modern world thinks too much as though painlessness and freedom
+from danger were ultimate ends. It is fear-haunted, it is troubled
+by the thoughts of pain and death, which it has never met except as
+well-guarded children meet these things, in exaggerated and untestable
+forms, in the menagerie or in nightmares. And so it thinks the discovery
+of anaesthetics the crowning triumph of civilization, and cosiness and
+innocent amusement, those ideals of the nursery, the whole purpose of
+mankind....”
+
+“Mm,” said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his brows
+and shook his head.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+But the bulk of Benham's discussion of fear was not concerned with
+this perverse and overstrained suggestion of pleasure reached through
+torture, this exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink at
+anything; it was an examination of the present range and use of fear
+that led gradually to something like a theory of control and discipline.
+The second of his two dominating ideas was that fear is an instinct
+arising only in isolation, that in a crowd there may be a collective
+panic, but that there is no real individual fear. Fear, Benham held,
+drives the man back to the crowd, the dog to its master, the wolf to the
+pack, and when it is felt that the danger is pooled, then fear leaves
+us. He was quite prepared to meet the objection that animals of a
+solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit fear. Some of this apparent fear,
+he argued, was merely discretion, and what is not discretion is the
+survival of an infantile characteristic. The fear felt by a tiger cub
+is certainly a social emotion, that drives it back to the other cubs,
+to its mother and the dark hiding of the lair. The fear of a fully grown
+tiger sends it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, that must be
+“still reminiscent of the maternal lair.” But fear has very little hold
+upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme readiness to
+resentment and rage.
+
+“Like most inexperienced people,” ran his notes, “I was astonished at
+the reported feats of men in war; I believed they were exaggerated,
+and that there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy of silence about
+their real behaviour. But when on my way to visit India for the third
+time I turned off to see what I could of the fighting before Adrianople,
+I discovered at once that a thousand casually selected conscripts will,
+every one of them, do things together that not one of them could by any
+means be induced to do alone. I saw men not merely obey orders that
+gave them the nearly certain prospect of death, but I saw them exceeding
+orders; I saw men leap out of cover for the mere sake of defiance, and
+fall shot through and smashed by a score of bullets. I saw a number
+of Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, several quite frightfully
+wounded, refuse chloroform merely to impress the English onlooker, some
+of their injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched a line
+of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on quite manifestly cheerful
+with men dropping out and wriggling, and men dropping out and lying
+still until every other man was down.... Not one man would have gone up
+that hill alone, without onlookers....”
+
+Rowe, the lion hunter, told Benham that only on one occasion in his life
+had he given way to ungovernable fear, and that was when he was alone.
+Many times he had been in fearful situations in the face of charging
+lions and elephants, and once he had been bowled over and carried some
+distance by a lion, but on none of these occasions had fear demoralized
+him. There was no question of his general pluck. But on one occasion he
+was lost in rocky waterless country in Somaliland. He strayed out in the
+early morning while his camels were being loaded, followed some antelope
+too far, and lost his bearings. He looked up expecting to see the sun
+on his right hand and found it on his left. He became bewildered. He
+wandered some time and then fired three signal shots and got no reply.
+Then losing his head he began shouting. He had only four or five more
+cartridges and no water-bottle. His men were accustomed to his going on
+alone, and might not begin to remark upon his absence until sundown....
+It chanced, however, that one of the shikari noted the water-bottle he
+had left behind and organized a hunt for him.
+
+Long before they found him he had passed to an extremity of terror. The
+world had become hideous and threatening, the sun was a pitiless glare,
+each rocky ridge he clambered became more dreadful than the last, each
+new valley into which he looked more hateful and desolate, the cramped
+thorn bushes threatened him gauntly, the rocks had a sinister lustre,
+and in every blue shadow about him the night and death lurked and
+waited. There was no hurry for them, presently they would spread out
+again and join and submerge him, presently in the confederated darkness
+he could be stalked and seized and slain. Yes, this he admitted was real
+fear. He had cracked his voice, yelling as a child yells. And then he
+had become afraid of his own voice....
+
+“Now this excess of fear in isolation, this comfort in a crowd, in
+support and in a refuge, even when support or refuge is quite illusory,
+is just exactly what one would expect of fear if one believed it to be
+an instinct which has become a misfit. In the ease of the soldier fear
+is so much a misfit that instead of saving him for the most part it
+destroys him. Raw soldiers under fire bunch together and armies fight in
+masses, men are mowed down in swathes, because only so is the courage of
+the common men sustained, only so can they be brave, albeit spread out
+and handling their weapons as men of unqualified daring would handle
+them they would be infinitely safer and more effective....
+
+“And all of us, it may be, are restrained by this misfit fear from a
+thousand bold successful gestures of mind and body, we are held back
+from the attainment of mighty securities in pitiful temporary shelters
+that are perhaps in the end no better than traps....”
+
+From such considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the crowd
+can be replaced in a man's imagination, how far some substitute for that
+social backing can be made to serve the same purpose in neutralizing
+fear. He wrote with the calm of a man who weighs the probabilities of a
+riddle, and with the zeal of a man lost to every material consideration.
+His writing, it seemed to White, had something of the enthusiastic
+whiteness of his face, the enthusiastic brightness of his eyes. We can
+no more banish fear from our being at present than we can carve out the
+fleshy pillars of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain. It is deep
+in our inheritance. As deep as hunger. And just as we have to satisfy
+hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy the
+unconquerable importunity of fear. We have to reassure our faltering
+instincts. There must be something to take the place of lair and
+familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we must carry with
+us into the lonely places. For it is true that man has now not only
+to learn to fight in open order instead of in a phalanx, but he has to
+think and plan and act in open order, to live in open order....
+
+Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, “This brings
+me to God.”
+
+“The devil it does!” said White, roused to a keener attention.
+
+“By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so long as
+we feel indeed alone. An isolated man, an egoist, an Epicurean man, will
+always fail himself in the solitary place. There must be something more
+with us to sustain us against this vast universe than the spark of life
+that began yesterday and must be extinguished to-morrow. There can be
+no courage beyond social courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd,
+until there is in us the sense of God. But God is a word that covers a
+multitude of meanings. When I was a boy I was a passionate atheist, I
+defied God, and so far as God is the mere sanction of social traditions
+and pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd's will in canonicals, I
+do still deny him and repudiate him. That God I heard of first from my
+nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper God of all the nursemaids
+of mankind. But there is another God than that God of obedience, God the
+immortal adventurer in me, God who calls men from home and country, God
+scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in a nail-pierced body out of
+death and came not to bring peace but a sword.”
+
+With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who
+was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of
+Benham's spirit. They were written in pencil; they were unfinished when
+he died.
+
+(Surely the man was not a Christian!)
+
+“You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you cannot
+suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain because you
+have identified your life with the honour of mankind and the insatiable
+adventurousness of man's imagination, so that the possible death is
+negligible and the possible achievement altogether outweighs it.”...
+
+White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.
+
+He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had always
+taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever. But this
+was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it seemed to
+him, a posthumous betrayal....
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon Benham.
+He had gone with Kepple, of the forestry department, into the jungle
+country in the hills above the Tapti. He had been very anxious to see
+something of that aspect of Indian life, and he had snatched at the
+chance Kepple had given him. But they had scarcely started before the
+expedition was brought to an end by an accident, Kepple was thrown by
+a pony and his ankle broken. He and Benham bandaged it as well as they
+could, and a litter was sent for, and meanwhile they had to wait in the
+camp that was to have been the centre of their jungle raids. The second
+day of this waiting was worse for Kepple than the first, and he suffered
+much from the pressure of this amateurish bandaging. In the evening
+Benham got cool water from the well and rearranged things better; the
+two men dined and smoked under their thatched roof beneath the big
+banyan, and then Kepple, tired out by his day of pain, was carried to
+his tent. Presently he fell asleep and Benham was left to himself.
+
+Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to sleep.
+He felt full of life and anxious for happenings.
+
+He went back and sat down upon the iron bedstead beneath the banyan,
+that Kepple had lain upon through the day, and he watched the soft
+immensity of the Indian night swallow up the last lingering colours of
+the world. It left the outlines, it obliterated nothing, but it stripped
+off the superficial reality of things. The moon was full and high
+overhead, and the light had not so much gone as changed from definition
+and the blazing glitter and reflections of solidity to a translucent and
+unsubstantial clearness. The jungle that bordered the little encampment
+north, south, and west seemed to have crept a little nearer, enriched
+itself with blackness, taken to itself voices.
+
+(Surely it had been silent during the day.)
+
+A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead grass and the
+leaves. In the day the air had been still.
+
+Immediately after the sunset there had been a great crying of peacocks
+in the distance, but that was over now; the crickets, however,
+were still noisy, and a persistent sound had become predominant, an
+industrious unmistakable sound, a sound that took his mind back to
+England, in midsummer. It was like a watchman's rattle--a nightjar!
+
+So there were nightjars here in India, too! One might have expected
+something less familiar. And then came another cry from far away over
+the heat-stripped tree-tops, a less familiar cry. It was repeated. Was
+that perhaps some craving leopard, a tiger cat, a panther?--
+
+“HUNT, HUNT”; that might be a deer.
+
+Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite close
+at hand. A monkey?...
+
+These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were
+bats....
+
+Of course, the day jungle is the jungle asleep. This was its waking
+hour. Now the deer were arising from their forms, the bears creeping
+out of their dens amidst the rocks and blundering down the gullies,
+the tigers and panthers and jungle cats stalking noiselessly from their
+lairs in the grass. Countless creatures that had hidden from the heat
+and pitiless exposure of the day stood now awake and alertly intent upon
+their purposes, grazed or sought water, flitting delicately through the
+moonlight and shadows. The jungle was awakening. Again Benham heard that
+sound like the belling of a stag....
+
+This was the real life of the jungle, this night life, into which man
+did not go. Here he was on the verge of a world that for all the stuffed
+trophies of the sportsman and the specimens of the naturalist is still
+almost as unknown as if it was upon another planet. What intruders men
+are, what foreigners in the life of this ancient system!
+
+He looked over his shoulder, and there were the two little tents,
+one that sheltered Kepple and one that awaited him, and beyond, in an
+irregular line, glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men. One or two
+turbaned figures still flitted about, and there was a voice--low,
+monotonous--it must have been telling a tale. Further, sighing and
+stirring ever and again, were tethered beasts, and then a great pale
+space of moonlight and the clumsy outlines of the village well. The
+clustering village itself slept in darkness beyond the mango trees,
+and still remoter the black encircling jungle closed in. One might have
+fancied this was the encampment of newly-come invaders, were it not
+for the larger villages that are overgrown with thickets and altogether
+swallowed up again in the wilderness, and for the deserted temples that
+are found rent asunder by the roots of trees and the ancient embankments
+that hold water only for the drinking of the sambur deer....
+
+Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again....
+
+He had come far out of his way to visit this strange world of the
+ancient life, that now recedes and dwindles before our new civilization,
+that seems fated to shrivel up and pass altogether before the dry
+advance of physical science and material organization. He was full of
+unsatisfied curiosities about its fierce hungers and passions, its fears
+and cruelties, its instincts and its well-nigh incommunicable and yet
+most precious understandings. He had long ceased to believe that the
+wild beast is wholly evil, and safety and plenty the ultimate good for
+men....
+
+Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life than he
+was now.
+
+It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand and so
+inaccessible....
+
+As Benham sat brooding over his disappointment the moon, swimming on
+through the still circle of the hours, passed slowly over him. The
+lights and shadows about him changed by imperceptible gradations and
+a long pale alley where the native cart track drove into the forest,
+opened slowly out of the darkness, slowly broadened, slowly lengthened.
+It opened out to him with a quality of invitation....
+
+There was the jungle before him. Was it after all so inaccessible?
+
+“Come!” the road said to him.
+
+Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the moonlight and stood
+motionless.
+
+Was he afraid?
+
+Even now some hungry watchful monster might lurk in yonder shadows,
+watching with infinite still patience. Kepple had told him how they
+would sit still for hours--staring unblinkingly as cats stare at a
+fire--and then crouch to advance. Beneath the shrill overtone of
+the nightjars, what noiseless grey shapes, what deep breathings and
+cracklings and creepings might there not be?...
+
+Was he afraid?
+
+That question determined him to go.
+
+He hesitated whether he should take a gun. A stick? A gun, he knew, was
+a dangerous thing to an inexperienced man. No! He would go now, even as
+he was with empty hands. At least he would go as far as the end of that
+band of moonlight. If for no other reason than because he was afraid.
+NOW!
+
+For a moment it seemed to him as though his feet were too heavy to lift
+and then, hands in pockets, khaki-clad, an almost invisible figure, he
+strolled towards the cart-track.
+
+Come to that, he halted for a moment to regard the distant fires of
+the men. No one would miss him. They would think he was in his tent.
+He faced the stirring quiet ahead. The cart-track was a rutted path of
+soft, warm sand, on which he went almost noiselessly. A bird squabbled
+for an instant in a thicket. A great white owl floated like a flake of
+moonlight across the track and vanished without a sound among the trees.
+
+Along the moonlit path went Benham, and when he passed near trees his
+footsteps became noisy with the rustle and crash of dead leaves. The
+jungle was full of moonlight; twigs, branches, creepers, grass-clumps
+came out acutely vivid. The trees and bushes stood in pools of darkness,
+and beyond were pale stretches of misty moonshine and big rocks shining
+with an unearthly lustre. Things seemed to be clear and yet uncertain.
+It was as if they dissolved or retired a little and then returned to
+solidity.
+
+A sudden chattering broke out overhead, and black across the great
+stars soared a flying squirrel and caught a twig, and ran for shelter.
+A second hesitated in a tree-top and pursued. They chased each other and
+vanished abruptly. He forgot his sense of insecurity in the interest of
+these active little silhouettes. And he noted how much bigger and more
+wonderful the stars can look when one sees them through interlacing
+branches.
+
+Ahead was darkness; but not so dark when he came to it that the track
+was invisible. He was at the limit of his intention, but now he saw that
+that had been a childish project. He would go on, he would walk right
+into the jungle. His first disinclination was conquered, and the soft
+intoxication of the subtropical moonshine was in his blood.... But he
+wished he could walk as a spirit walks, without this noise of leaves....
+
+Yes, this was very wonderful and beautiful, and there must always be
+jungles for men to walk in. Always there must be jungles....
+
+Some small beast snarled and bolted from under his feet. He stopped
+sharply. He had come into a darkness under great boughs, and now he
+stood still as the little creature scuttled away. Beyond the track
+emerged into a dazzling whiteness....
+
+In the stillness he could hear the deer belling again in the distance,
+and then came a fuss of monkeys in a group of trees near at hand. He
+remained still until this had died away into mutterings.
+
+Then on the verge of movement he was startled by a ripe mango that
+slipped from its stalk and fell out of the tree and struck his hand.
+It took a little time to understand that, and then he laughed, and his
+muscles relaxed, and he went on again.
+
+A thorn caught at him and he disentangled himself.
+
+He crossed the open space, and the moon was like a great shield of light
+spread out above him. All the world seemed swimming in its radiance. The
+stars were like lamps in a mist of silvery blue.
+
+The track led him on across white open spaces of shrivelled grass and
+sand, amidst trees where shadows made black patternings upon the silver,
+and then it plunged into obscurities. For a time it lifted, and then
+on one hand the bush fell away, and he saw across a vast moonlit valley
+wide undulations of open cultivation, belts of jungle, copses, and a
+great lake as black as ebony. For a time the path ran thus open, and
+then the jungle closed in again and there were more thickets, more
+levels of grass, and in one place far overhead among the branches he
+heard and stood for a time perplexed at a vast deep humming of bees....
+
+Presently a black monster with a hunched back went across his path
+heedless of him and making a great noise in the leaves. He stood quite
+still until it had gone. He could not tell whether it was a boar or
+hyaena; most probably, he thought, a boar because of the heaviness of
+its rush.
+
+The path dropped downhill for a time, crossed a ravine, ascended. He
+passed a great leafless tree on which there were white flowers. On the
+ground also, in the darkness under the tree, there were these flowers;
+they were dropping noiselessly, and since they were visible in the
+shadows, it seemed to him that they must be phosphorescent. And they
+emitted a sweetish scent that lay heavily athwart the path. Presently he
+passed another such tree. Then he became aware of a tumult ahead of him,
+a smashing of leaves, a snorting and slobbering, grunting and sucking,
+a whole series of bestial sounds. He halted for a little while, and then
+drew nearer, picking his steps to avoid too great a noise. Here were
+more of those white-blossomed trees, and beneath, in the darkness,
+something very black and big was going to and fro, eating greedily. Then
+he found that there were two and then more of these black things, three
+or four of them.
+
+Curiosity made Benham draw nearer, very softly.
+
+Presently one showed in a patch of moonlight, startlingly big, a huge,
+black hairy monster with a long white nose on a grotesque face, and he
+was stuffing armfuls of white blossom into his mouth with his curved
+fore claws. He took not the slightest notice of the still man, who stood
+perhaps twenty yards away from him. He was too blind and careless. He
+snorted and smacked his slobbering lips, and plunged into the shadows
+again. Benham heard him root among the leaves and grunt appreciatively.
+The air was heavy with the reek of the crushed flowers.
+
+For some time Benham remained listening to and peering at these
+preoccupied gluttons. At last he shrugged his shoulders, and left them
+and went on his way. For a long time he could hear them, then just as he
+was on the verge of forgetting them altogether, some dispute arose among
+them, and there began a vast uproar, squeals, protests, comments, one
+voice ridiculously replete and authoritative, ridiculously suggestive
+of a drunken judge with his mouth full, and a shrill voice of grievance
+high above the others....
+
+The uproar of the bears died away at last, almost abruptly, and left the
+jungle to the incessant night-jars....
+
+For what end was this life of the jungle?
+
+All Benham's senses were alert to the sounds and appearances about him,
+and at the same time his mind was busy with the perplexities of that
+riddle. Was the jungle just an aimless pool of life that man must drain
+and clear away? Or is it to have a use in the greater life of our race
+that now begins? Will man value the jungle as he values the precipice,
+for the sake of his manhood? Will he preserve it?
+
+Man must keep hard, man must also keep fierce. Will the jungle keep him
+fierce?
+
+For life, thought Benham, there must be insecurity....
+
+He had missed the track....
+
+He was now in a second ravine. He was going downward, walking on silvery
+sand amidst great boulders, and now there was a new sound in the
+air--. It was the croaking of frogs. Ahead was a solitary gleam. He was
+approaching a jungle pool....
+
+Suddenly the stillness was alive, in a panic uproar. “HONK!” cried a
+great voice, and “HONK!” There was a clatter of hoofs, a wild rush--a
+rush as it seemed towards him. Was he being charged? He backed against a
+rock. A great pale shape leaped by him, an antlered shape. It was a herd
+of big deer bolting suddenly out of the stillness. He heard the swish
+and smash of their retreat grow distant, disperse. He remained standing
+with his back to the rock.
+
+Slowly the strophe and antistrophe of frogs and goat-suckers resumed
+possession of his consciousness. But now some primitive instinct
+perhaps or some subconscious intimation of danger made him meticulously
+noiseless.
+
+He went on down a winding sound-deadening path of sand towards the
+drinking-place. He came to a wide white place that was almost level, and
+beyond it under clustering pale-stemmed trees shone the mirror surface
+of some ancient tank, and, sharp and black, a dog-like beast sat on its
+tail in the midst of this space, started convulsively and went slinking
+into the undergrowth. Benham paused for a moment and then walked out
+softly into the light, and, behold! as if it were to meet him, came
+a monster, a vast dark shape drawing itself lengthily out of the
+blackness, and stopped with a start as if it had been instantly changed
+to stone.
+
+It had stopped with one paw advanced. Its striped mask was light and
+dark grey in the moonlight, grey but faintly tinged with ruddiness; its
+mouth was a little open, its fangs and a pendant of viscous saliva shone
+vivid. Its great round-pupilled eyes regarded him stedfastly. At last
+the nightmare of Benham's childhood had come true, and he was face to
+face with a tiger, uncaged, uncontrolled.
+
+For some moments neither moved, neither the beast nor the man. They
+stood face to face, each perhaps with an equal astonishment, motionless
+and soundless, in that mad Indian moonlight that makes all things like a
+dream.
+
+Benham stood quite motionless, and body and mind had halted together.
+That confrontation had an interminableness that had nothing to do with
+the actual passage of time. Then some trickle of his previous thoughts
+stirred in the frozen quiet of his mind.
+
+He spoke hoarsely. “I am Man,” he said, and lifted a hand as he spoke.
+“The Thought of the world.”
+
+His heart leapt within him as the tiger moved. But the great beast
+went sideways, gardant, only that its head was low, three noiseless
+instantaneous strides it made, and stood again watching him.
+
+“Man,” he said, in a voice that had no sound, and took a step forward.
+
+“Wough!” With two bounds the monster had become a great grey streak
+that crackled and rustled in the shadows of the trees. And then it
+had vanished, become invisible and inaudible with a kind of
+instantaneousness.
+
+For some seconds or some minutes Benham stood rigid, fearlessly
+expectant, and then far away up the ravine he heard the deer repeat
+their cry of alarm, and understood with a new wisdom that the tiger had
+passed among them and was gone....
+
+He walked on towards the deserted tank and now he was talking aloud.
+
+“I understand the jungle. I understand.... If a few men die here, what
+matter? There are worse deaths than being killed....
+
+“What is this fool's trap of security?
+
+“Every time in my life that I have fled from security I have fled from
+death....
+
+“Let men stew in their cities if they will. It is in the lonely places,
+in jungles and mountains, in snows and fires, in the still observatories
+and the silent laboratories, in those secret and dangerous places where
+life probes into life, it is there that the masters of the world, the
+lords of the beast, the rebel sons of Fate come to their own....
+
+“You sleeping away there in the cities! Do you know what it means for
+you that I am here to-night?
+
+“Do you know what it means to you?
+
+“I am just one--just the precursor.
+
+“Presently, if you will not budge, those hot cities must be burnt about
+you. You must come out of them....”
+
+He wandered now uttering his thoughts as they came to him, and he saw no
+more living creatures because they fled and hid before the sound of his
+voice. He wandered until the moon, larger now and yellow tinged, was low
+between the black bars of the tree stems. And then it sank very suddenly
+behind a hilly spur and the light failed swiftly.
+
+He stumbled and went with difficulty. He could go no further among these
+rocks and ravines, and he sat down at the foot of a tree to wait for
+day.
+
+He sat very still indeed.
+
+A great stillness came over the world, a velvet silence that wrapped
+about him, as the velvet shadows wrapped about him. The corncrakes had
+ceased, all the sounds and stir of animal life had died away, the breeze
+had fallen. A drowsing comfort took possession of him. He grew more
+placid and more placid still. He was enormously content to find that
+fear had fled before him and was gone. He drifted into that state of
+mind when one thinks without ideas, when one's mind is like a starless
+sky, serene and empty.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+Some hours later Benham found that the trees and rocks were growing
+visible again, and he saw a very bright star that he knew must be
+Lucifer rising amidst the black branches. He was sitting upon a rock at
+the foot of a slender-stemmed leafless tree. He had been asleep, and it
+was daybreak. Everything was coldly clear and colourless.
+
+He must have slept soundly.
+
+He heard a cock crow, and another answer--jungle fowl these must be,
+because there could be no village within earshot--and then far away and
+bringing back memories of terraced houses and ripe walled gardens, was
+the scream of peacocks. And some invisible bird was making a hollow
+beating sound among the trees near at hand. TUNK.... TUNK, and out of
+the dry grass came a twittering.
+
+There was a green light in the east that grew stronger, and the stars
+after their magnitudes were dissolving in the blue; only a few remained
+faintly visible. The sound of birds increased. Through the trees he saw
+towering up a great mauve thing like the back of a monster,--but that
+was nonsense, it was the crest of a steep hillside covered with woods of
+teak.
+
+He stood up and stretched himself, and wondered whether he had dreamed
+of a tiger.
+
+He tried to remember and retrace the course of his over-night
+wanderings.
+
+A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and then
+far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart.
+
+He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly and
+thoughtfully.
+
+Presently he came to a familiar place, a group of trees, a sheet of
+water, and the ruins of an old embankment. It was the ancient tank of
+his overnight encounter. The pool of his dream?
+
+With doubt still in his mind, he walked round its margin to the sandy
+level beyond, and cast about and sought intently, and at last found, and
+then found clearly, imposed upon the tracks of several sorts of deer and
+the footprints of many biggish birds, first the great spoor of the
+tiger and then his own. Here the beast had halted, and here it had leapt
+aside. Here his own footmarks stopped. Here his heels had come together.
+
+It had been no dream.
+
+There was a white mist upon the water of the old tank like the bloom
+upon a plum, and the trees about it seemed smaller and the sand-space
+wider and rougher than they had seemed in the moonshine. Then the ground
+had looked like a floor of frosted silver.
+
+And thence he went on upward through the fresh morning, until just as
+the east grew red with sunrise, he reached the cart-track from which he
+had strayed overnight. It was, he found, a longer way back to the camp
+than he remembered it to be. Perhaps he had struck the path further
+along. It curved about and went up and down and crossed three ravines.
+At last he came to that trampled place of littered white blossom under
+great trees where he had seen the bears.
+
+The sunlight went before him in a sheaf of golden spears, and his
+shadow, that was at first limitless, crept towards his feet. The dew had
+gone from the dead grass and the sand was hot to his dry boots before he
+came back into the open space about the great banyan and the tents. And
+Kepple, refreshed by a night's rest and coffee, was wondering loudly
+where the devil he had gone.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE BOY GROWS UP
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Benham was the son of a schoolmaster. His father was assistant first at
+Cheltenham, and subsequently at Minchinghampton, and then he became
+head and later on sole proprietor of Martindale House, a high-class
+preparatory school at Seagate. He was extremely successful for some
+years, as success goes in the scholastic profession, and then disaster
+overtook him in the shape of a divorce. His wife, William Porphyry's
+mother, made the acquaintance of a rich young man named Nolan, who was
+recuperating at Seagate from the sequelae of snake-bite, malaria, and a
+gun accident in Brazil. She ran away with him, and she was divorced.
+She was, however, unable to marry him because he died at Wiesbaden
+only three days after the Reverend Harold Benham obtained his decree
+absolute. Instead, therefore, being a woman of great spirit, enterprise
+and sweetness, she married Godfrey Marayne, afterwards Sir Godfrey
+Marayne, the great London surgeon.
+
+Nolan was a dark, rather melancholy and sentimental young man, and he
+left about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs. Benham
+and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed himself to have
+injured. With this and a husband already distinguished, she returned
+presently to London, and was on the whole fairly well received there.
+
+It was upon the reverend gentleman at Seagate that the brunt of this
+divorce fell. There is perhaps a certain injustice in the fact that a
+schoolmaster who has lost his wife should also lose the more valuable
+proportion of his pupils, but the tone of thought in England is against
+any association of a schoolmaster with matrimonial irregularity. And
+also Mr. Benham remarried. It would certainly have been better for him
+if he could have produced a sister. His school declined and his efforts
+to resuscitate it only hastened its decay. Conceiving that he could now
+only appeal to the broader-minded, more progressive type of parent,
+he became an educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the
+curriculum with increasing frequency to the TIMES. He expended a
+considerable fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science laboratory
+and a fives court; he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teaching
+Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about a thousand volumes,
+including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late Lord Avebury,
+to the school equipment. None of these things did anything but enhance
+the suspicion of laxity his wife's escapade had created in the limited
+opulent and discreet class to which his establishment appealed. One
+boy who, under the influence of the Hundred Best Books, had quoted the
+ZEND-AVESTA to an irascible but influential grandfather, was withdrawn
+without notice or compensation in the middle of the term. It intensifies
+the tragedy of the Reverend Harold Benham's failure that in no
+essential respect did his school depart from the pattern of all other
+properly-conducted preparatory schools.
+
+In appearance he was near the average of scholastic English gentlemen.
+He displayed a manifest handsomeness somewhat weakened by disregard and
+disuse, a large moustache and a narrow high forehead. His rather
+tired brown eyes were magnified by glasses. He was an active man in
+unimportant things, with a love for the phrase “ship-shape,” and he
+played cricket better than any one else on the staff. He walked in wide
+strides, and would sometimes use the tail of his gown on the blackboard.
+Like so many clergymen and schoolmasters, he had early distrusted
+his natural impulse in conversation, and had adopted the defensive
+precaution of a rather formal and sonorous speech, which habit had made
+a part of him. His general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up
+things that might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice,
+keeping up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was
+only too manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy of
+administration in a school that must not be too manifestly impoverished,
+keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and rather a flutterer
+of dovecots--with its method of manual training for example--keeping up
+ESPRIT DE CORPS and the manliness of himself and every one about him,
+keeping up his affection for his faithful second wife and his complete
+forgetfulness of and indifference to that spirit of distracting impulse
+and insubordination away there in London, who had once been his delight
+and insurmountable difficulty. “After my visits to her,” wrote Benham,
+“he would show by a hundred little expressions and poses and acts how
+intensely he wasn't noting that anything of the sort had occurred.”
+
+But one thing that from the outset the father seemed to have failed to
+keep up thoroughly was his intention to mould and dominate his son.
+
+The advent of his boy had been a tremendous event in the reverend
+gentleman's life. It is not improbable that his disposition to
+monopolize the pride of this event contributed to the ultimate
+disruption of his family. It left so few initiatives within the home to
+his wife. He had been an early victim to that wave of philoprogenitive
+and educational enthusiasm which distinguished the closing decade of the
+nineteenth century. He was full of plans in those days for the education
+of his boy, and the thought of the youngster played a large part in
+the series of complicated emotional crises with which he celebrated
+the departure of his wife, crises in which a number of old school and
+college friends very generously assisted--spending weekends at Seagate
+for this purpose, and mingling tobacco, impassioned handclasps and
+suchlike consolation with much patient sympathetic listening to his
+carefully balanced analysis of his feelings. He declared that his son
+was now his one living purpose in life, and he sketched out a scheme of
+moral and intellectual training that he subsequently embodied in five
+very stimulating and intimate articles for the SCHOOL WORLD, but never
+put into more than partial operation.
+
+“I have read my father's articles upon this subject,” wrote Benham,
+“and I am still perplexed to measure just what I owe to him. Did he ever
+attempt this moral training he contemplated so freely? I don't think
+he did. I know now, I knew then, that he had something in his mind....
+There were one or two special walks we had together, he invited me
+to accompany him with a certain portentousness, and we would go out
+pregnantly making superficial remarks about the school cricket and
+return, discussing botany, with nothing said.
+
+“His heart failed him.
+
+“Once or twice, too, he seemed to be reaching out at me from the school
+pulpit.
+
+“I think that my father did manage to convey to me his belief that there
+were these fine things, honour, high aims, nobilities. If I did not get
+this belief from him then I do not know how I got it. But it was as if
+he hinted at a treasure that had got very dusty in an attic, a treasure
+which he hadn't himself been able to spend....”
+
+The father who had intended to mould his son ended by watching him grow,
+not always with sympathy or understanding. He was an overworked man
+assailed by many futile anxieties. One sees him striding about the
+establishment with his gown streaming out behind him urging on the
+groundsman or the gardener, or dignified, expounding the particular
+advantages of Seagate to enquiring parents, one sees him unnaturally
+cheerful and facetious at the midday dinner table, one imagines him
+keeping up high aspirations in a rather too hastily scribbled sermon in
+the school pulpit, or keeping up an enthusiasm for beautiful language in
+a badly-prepared lesson on Virgil, or expressing unreal indignation and
+unjustifiably exalted sentiments to evil doers, and one realizes his
+disadvantage against the quiet youngster whose retentive memory was
+storing up all these impressions for an ultimate judgment, and one
+understands, too, a certain relief that mingled with his undeniable
+emotion when at last the time came for young Benham, “the one living
+purpose” of his life, to be off to Minchinghampton and the next step in
+the mysterious ascent of the English educational system.
+
+Three times at least, and with an increased interval, the father wrote
+fine fatherly letters that would have stood the test of publication.
+Then his communications became comparatively hurried and matter-of-fact.
+His boy's return home for the holidays was always rather a stirring time
+for his private feelings, but he became more and more inexpressive. He
+would sometimes lay a hand on those growing shoulders and then withdraw
+it. They felt braced-up shoulders, stiffly inflexible or--they would
+wince. And when one has let the habit of indefinite feelings grow upon
+one, what is there left to say? If one did say anything one might be
+asked questions....
+
+One or two of the long vacations they spent abroad together. The last
+of these occasions followed Benham's convalescence at Montana and his
+struggle with the Bisse; the two went to Zermatt and did several peaks
+and crossed the Theodule, and it was clear that their joint expeditions
+were a strain upon both of them. The father thought the son reckless,
+unskilful, and impatient; the son found the father's insistence upon
+guides, ropes, precautions, the recognized way, the highest point and
+back again before you get a chill, and talk about it sagely but very,
+very modestly over pipes, tiresome. He wanted to wander in deserts of
+ice and see over the mountains, and discover what it is to be benighted
+on a precipice. And gradually he was becoming familiar with his father's
+repertory of Greek quotations. There was no breach between them, but
+each knew that holiday was the last they would ever spend together....
+
+The court had given the custody of young William Porphyry into his
+father's hands, but by a generous concession it was arranged that his
+mother should have him to see her for an hour or so five times a year.
+The Nolan legacy, however, coming upon the top of this, introduced
+a peculiar complication that provided much work for tactful
+intermediaries, and gave great and increasing scope for painful
+delicacies on the part of Mr. Benham as the boy grew up.
+
+“I see,” said the father over his study pipe and with his glasses fixed
+on remote distances above the head of the current sympathizer, “I see
+more and more clearly that the tale of my sacrifices is not yet at an
+end.... In many respects he is like her.... Quick. Too quick.... He must
+choose. But I know his choice. Yes, yes,--I'm not blind. She's worked
+upon him.... I have done what I could to bring out the manhood in him.
+Perhaps it will bear the strain.... It will be a wrench, old man--God
+knows.”
+
+He did his very best to make it a wrench.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Benham's mother, whom he saw quarterly and also on the first of May,
+because it was her birthday, touched and coloured his imagination far
+more than his father did. She was now Lady Marayne, and a prominent,
+successful, and happy little lady. Her dereliction had been forgiven
+quite soon, and whatever whisper of it remained was very completely
+forgotten during the brief period of moral kindliness which followed
+the accession of King Edward the Seventh. It no doubt contributed to
+her social reinstatement that her former husband was entirely devoid
+of social importance, while, on the other hand, Sir Godfrey Marayne's
+temporary monopoly of the caecal operation which became so fashionable
+in the last decade of Queen Victoria's reign as to be practically
+epidemic, created a strong feeling in her favour.
+
+She was blue-eyed and very delicately complexioned, quick-moving, witty,
+given to little storms of clean enthusiasm; she loved handsome things,
+brave things, successful things, and the respect and affection of all
+the world. She did quite what she liked upon impulse, and nobody ever
+thought ill of her.
+
+Her family were the Mantons of Blent, quite good west-country people.
+She had broken away from them before she was twenty to marry Benham,
+whom she had idealized at a tennis party. He had talked of his work and
+she had seen it in a flash, the noblest work in the world, him at
+his daily divine toil and herself a Madonna surrounded by a troupe of
+Blessed Boys--all of good family, some of quite the best. For a time she
+had kept it up even more than he had, and then Nolan had distracted her
+with a realization of the heroism that goes to the ends of the earth.
+She became sick with desire for the forests of Brazil, and the Pacific,
+and--a peak in Darien. Immediately the school was frowsty beyond
+endurance, and for the first time she let herself perceive how
+dreadfully a gentleman and a scholar can smell of pipes and tobacco.
+Only one course lay open to a woman of spirit....
+
+For a year she did indeed live like a woman of spirit, and it was at
+Nolan's bedside that Marayne was first moved to admiration. She was
+plucky. All men love a plucky woman.
+
+Sir Godfrey Marayne smelt a good deal of antiseptic soap, but he talked
+in a way that amused her, and he trusted as well as adored her. She did
+what she liked with his money, her own money, and her son's trust money,
+and she did very well. From the earliest Benham's visits were to a
+gracious presence amidst wealthy surroundings. The transit from the
+moral blamelessness of Seagate had an entirely misleading effect of
+ascent.
+
+Their earlier encounters became rather misty in his memory; they
+occurred at various hotels in Seagate. Afterwards he would go, first
+taken by a governess, and later going alone, to Charing Cross, where he
+would be met, in earlier times by a maid and afterwards by a deferential
+manservant who called him “Sir,” and conveyed, sometimes in a hansom cab
+and later in a smart brougham, by Trafalgar Square, Lower Regent Street,
+Piccadilly, and streets of increasing wealth and sublimity to Sir
+Godfrey's house in Desborough Street. Very naturally he fell into
+thinking of these discreet and well-governed West End streets as a part
+of his mother's atmosphere.
+
+The house had a dignified portico, and always before he had got down
+to the pavement the door opened agreeably and a second respectful
+manservant stood ready. Then came the large hall, with its noiseless
+carpets and great Chinese jars, its lacquered cabinets and the wide
+staircase, and floating down the wide staircase, impatient to greet him,
+light and shining as a flower petal, sweet and welcoming, radiating a
+joyfulness as cool and clear as a dewy morning, came his mother. “WELL,
+little man, my son,” she would cry in her happy singing voice, “WELL?”
+
+So he thought she must always be, but indeed these meetings meant very
+much to her, she dressed for them and staged them, she perceived the
+bright advantages of her rarity and she was quite determined to have
+her son when the time came to possess him. She kissed him but not
+oppressively, she caressed him cleverly; it was only on these rare
+occasions that he was ever kissed or caressed, and she talked to his shy
+boyishness until it felt a more spirited variety of manhood. “What have
+you been doing?” she asked, “since I saw you last.”
+
+She never said he had grown, but she told him he looked tall; and though
+the tea was a marvellous display it was never an obtrusive tea, it
+wasn't poked at a fellow; a various plenty flowed well within reach of
+one's arm, like an agreeable accompaniment to their conversation.
+
+“What have you done? All sorts of brave things? Do you swim now? I can
+swim. Oh! I can swim half a mile. Some day we will swim races together.
+Why not? And you ride?...
+
+“The horse bolted--and you stuck on? Did you squeak? I stick on, but I
+HAVE to squeak. But you--of course, No! you mustn't. I'm just a little
+woman. And I ride big horses....”
+
+And for the end she had invented a characteristic little ceremony.
+
+She would stand up in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders
+and look into his face.
+
+“Clean eyes?” she would say, “--still?”
+
+Then she would take his ears in her little firm hands and kiss very
+methodically his eyes and his forehead and his cheeks and at last his
+lips. Her own eyes would suddenly brim bright with tears.
+
+“GO,” she would say.
+
+That was the end.
+
+It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
+fairyland to this grey world again.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The contrast between Lady Marayne's pretty amenities and the good
+woman at Seagate who urged herself almost hourly to forget that William
+Porphyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair. The second Mrs.
+Benham's conscientious spirit and a certain handsome ability about her
+fitted her far more than her predecessor for the onerous duties of a
+schoolmaster's wife, but whatever natural buoyancy she possessed was
+outweighed by an irrepressible conviction derived from an episcopal
+grandparent that the remarriage of divorced persons is sinful, and by a
+secret but well-founded doubt whether her husband loved her with a truly
+romantic passion. She might perhaps have borne either of these troubles
+singly, but the two crushed her spirit.
+
+Her temperament was not one that goes out to meet happiness. She had
+reluctant affections and suspected rather than welcomed the facility
+of other people's. Her susceptibility to disagreeable impressions was
+however very ample, and life was fenced about with protections for her
+“feelings.” It filled young Benham with inexpressible indignations that
+his sweet own mother, so gay, so brightly cheerful that even her tears
+were stars, was never to be mentioned in his stepmother's presence, and
+it was not until he had fully come to years of reflection that he began
+to realize with what honesty, kindness and patience this naturally not
+very happy lady had nursed, protected, mended for and generally mothered
+him.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+As Benham grew to look manly and bear himself with pride, his mother's
+affection for him blossomed into a passion. She made him come down to
+London from Cambridge as often as she could; she went about with him;
+she made him squire her to theatres and take her out to dinners and
+sup with her at the Carlton, and in the summer she had him with her at
+Chexington Manor, the Hertfordshire house Sir Godfrey had given her.
+And always when they parted she looked into his eyes to see if they were
+still clean--whatever she meant by that--and she kissed his forehead and
+cheeks and eyes and lips. She began to make schemes for his career, she
+contrived introductions she judged would be useful to him later.
+
+Everybody found the relationship charming. Some of the more
+conscientious people, it is true, pretended to think that the Reverend
+Harold Benham was a first husband and long since dead, but that was all.
+As a matter of fact, in his increasingly futile way he wasn't, either at
+Seagate or in the Educational Supplement of the TIMES. But even the
+most conscientious of us are not obliged to go to Seagate or read the
+Educational Supplement of the TIMES.
+
+Lady Marayne's plans for her son's future varied very pleasantly. She
+was an industrious reader of biographies, and more particularly of the
+large fair biographies of the recently contemporary; they mentioned
+people she knew, they recalled scenes, each sowed its imaginative crop
+upon her mind, a crop that flourished and flowered until a newer growth
+came to oust it. She saw her son a diplomat, a prancing pro-consul, an
+empire builder, a trusted friend of the august, the bold leader of new
+movements, the saviour of ancient institutions, the youngest, brightest,
+modernest of prime ministers--or a tremendously popular poet. As a rule
+she saw him unmarried--with a wonderful little mother at his elbow.
+Sometimes in romantic flashes he was adored by German princesses
+or eloped with Russian grand-duchesses! But such fancies were HORS
+D'OEUVRE. The modern biography deals with the career. Every project was
+bright, every project had GO--tremendous go. And they all demanded a
+hero, debonnaire and balanced. And Benham, as she began to perceive,
+wasn't balanced. Something of his father had crept into him, a touch
+of moral stiffness. She knew the flavour of that so well. It was a
+stumbling, an elaboration, a spoil-sport and weakness. She tried not to
+admit to herself that even in the faintest degree it was there. But it
+was there.
+
+“Tell me all that you are doing NOW,” she said to him one afternoon when
+she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington Manor.
+“How do you like Cambridge? Are you making friends? Have you joined that
+thing--the Union, is it?--and delivered your maiden speech? If you're
+for politics, Poff, that's your game. Have you begun it?”
+
+She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red cushions in the punt,
+a little curled-up figure of white, with her sweet pale animated face
+warmed by the reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like little
+friendly heavens. And he, lean, and unconsciously graceful, sat at her
+feet and admired her beyond measure, and rejoiced that now at last
+they were going to be ever so much together, and doubted if it would be
+possible ever to love any other woman so much as he did her.
+
+He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the undergraduate
+life he was leading, but he found it difficult. All sorts of things that
+seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of drawing in the
+peculiar atmosphere she created about her. All sorts of clumsiness and
+youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt she wouldn't accept,
+couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her to accept. Before
+they could come before her they must wear a bravery. He couldn't, for
+instance, tell her how Billy Prothero, renouncing vanity and all social
+pretension, had worn a straw hat into November and the last stages of
+decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in
+the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer
+and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into
+the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness
+through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he
+concealed from her. What remained to tell was--attenuated. He could
+not romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to
+inspire a son who seemed most unaccountably up to nothing.
+
+“You must make good friends,” she said. “Isn't young Lord Breeze at
+your college? His mother the other day told me he was. And Sir Freddy
+Quenton's boy. And there are both the young Baptons at Cambridge.”
+
+He knew one of the Baptons.
+
+“Poff,” she said suddenly, “has it ever occurred to you what you are
+going to do afterwards. Do you know you are going to be quite well off?”
+
+Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. “My father said something.
+He was rather vague. It wasn't his affair--that kind of thing.”
+
+“You will be quite well off,” she repeated, without any complicating
+particulars. “You will be so well off that it will be possible for you
+to do anything almost that you like in the world. Nothing will tie you.
+Nothing....”
+
+“But--HOW well off?”
+
+“You will have several thousands a year.”
+
+“Thousands?”
+
+“Yes. Why not?”
+
+“But--Mother, this is rather astounding.... Does this mean there are
+estates somewhere, responsibilities?”
+
+“It is just money. Investments.”
+
+“You know, I've imagined--. I've thought always I should have to DO
+something.”
+
+“You MUST do something, Poff. But it needn't be for a living. The world
+is yours without that. And so you see you've got to make plans. You've
+got to know the sort of people who'll have things in their hands. You've
+got to keep out of--holes and corners. You've got to think of Parliament
+and abroad. There's the army, there's diplomacy. There's the Empire. You
+can be a Cecil Rhodes if you like. You can be a Winston....”
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Perhaps it was only the innate eagerness of Lady Marayne which made
+her feel disappointed in her son's outlook upon life. He did not choose
+among his glittering possibilities, he did not say what he was going to
+be, proconsul, ambassador, statesman, for days. And he talked VAGUELY of
+wanting to do something fine, but all in a fog. A boy of nearly nineteen
+ought to have at least the beginnings of SAVOIR FAIRE.
+
+Was he in the right set? Was he indeed in the right college? Trinity,
+by his account, seemed a huge featureless place--and might he not
+conceivably be LOST in it? In those big crowds one had to insist upon
+oneself. Poff never insisted upon himself--except quite at the wrong
+moment. And there was this Billy 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
+affections of men. So that it is among its foremost distinctions that
+its heart is steeled....”
+
+There this odd fragment ended and White was left to resume the
+interrupted autobiography.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+What moods, what passions, what nights of despair and gathering storms
+of anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are buried
+and hidden and implied in every love story! What a waste is there of
+exquisite things! So each spring sees a million glorious beginnings, a
+sunlit heaven in every opening leaf, warm perfection in every stirring
+egg, hope and fear and beauty beyond computation in every forest tree;
+and in the autumn before the snows come they have all gone, of all
+that incalculable abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure,
+excitement and deliciousness, there is scarcely more to be found than
+a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould or a rotting
+feather....
+
+White held the ten or twelve pencilled pages that told how Benham and
+Amanda drifted into antagonism and estrangement and as he held it he
+thought of the laughter and delight they must have had together, the
+exquisite excitements of her eye, the racing colour of her cheek, the
+gleams of light upon her skin, the flashes of wit between them, the
+sense of discovery, the high rare paths they had followed, the pools in
+which they had swum together. And now it was all gone into nothingness,
+there was nothing left of it, nothing at all, but just those sheets of
+statement, and it may be, stored away in one single mind, like things
+forgotten in an attic, a few neglected faded memories....
+
+And even those few sheets of statement were more than most love leaves
+behind it. For a time White would not read them. They lay neglected on
+his knee as he sat back in Benham's most comfortable chair and enjoyed
+an entirely beautiful melancholy.
+
+White too had seen and mourned the spring.
+
+Indeed, poor dear! he had seen and mourned several springs....
+
+With a sigh he took up the manuscript and read Benham's desiccated story
+of intellectual estrangement, and how in the end he had decided to
+leave his wife and go out alone upon that journey of inquiry he had been
+planning when first he met her.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Amanda had come back to England in a state of extravagantly vigorous
+womanhood. Benham's illness, though it lasted only two or three
+weeks, gave her a sense of power and leadership for which she had been
+struggling instinctively ever since they came together. For a time at
+Locarno he was lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she formed her
+bright and limited plans for London. Benham had no plans as yet but
+only a sense of divergence, as though he was being pulled in opposite
+directions by two irresistible forces. To her it was plain that he
+needed occupation, some distinguished occupation, and she could imagine
+nothing better for him than a political career. She perceived he had
+personality, that he stood out among men so that his very silences were
+effective. She loved him immensely, and she had tremendous ambitions for
+him and through him.
+
+And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with appetite.
+Her soul thirsted for London. It was like some enormous juicy fruit
+waiting for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large enough to give
+her avidity the sense of enough. She felt it waiting for her, household,
+servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly delight of buying and
+possessing things, the opera, first-nights, picture exhibitions, great
+dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties, crowds seen from a point
+of vantage, the carriage in a long string of fine carriages with the
+lamplit multitude peering, Amanda in a thousand bright settings, in a
+thousand various dresses. She had had love; it had been glorious, it
+was still glorious, but her love-making became now at times almost
+perfunctory in the contemplation of these approaching delights and
+splendours and excitements.
+
+She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in Benham's head; but she
+was a realist. She did not see why ideas should stand in the way of a
+career. Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind. One talks
+ideas, but THE THING THAT IS, IS THE THING THAT IS. And though she
+believed that Benham had a certain strength of character of his own, she
+had that sort of confidence in his love for her and in the power of her
+endearments that has in it the assurance of a faint contempt. She had
+mingled pride and sense in the glorious realization of the power over
+him that her wit and beauty gave her. She had held him faint with her
+divinity, intoxicated with the pride of her complete possession, and she
+did not dream that the moment when he should see clearly that she could
+deliberately use these ultimate delights to rule and influence him,
+would be the end of their splendour and her power. Her nature, which
+was just a nest of vigorous appetites, was incapable of suspecting his
+gathering disillusionment until it burst upon her.
+
+Now with her attention set upon London ahead he could observe her.
+In the beginning he had never seemed to be observing her at all, they
+dazzled one another; it seemed extraordinary now to him to note how much
+he had been able to disregard. There were countless times still when he
+would have dropped his observation and resumed that mutual exaltation
+very gladly, but always now other things possessed her mind....
+
+There was still an immense pleasure for him in her vigour; there was
+something delightful in her pounce, even when she was pouncing on things
+superficial, vulgar or destructive. She made him understand and share
+the excitement of a big night at the opera, the glitter and prettiness
+of a smart restaurant, the clustering little acute adventures of a great
+reception of gay people, just as she had already made him understand and
+sympathize with dogs. She picked up the art world where he had laid
+it down, and she forced him to feel dense and slow before he rebelled
+against her multitudinous enthusiasms and admirations. South Harting had
+had its little group of artistic people; it is not one of your sleepy
+villages, and she slipped back at once into the movement. Those were
+the great days of John, the days before the Post Impressionist outbreak.
+John, Orpen, Tonks, she bought them with vigour. Artistic circles began
+to revolve about her. Very rapidly she was in possession.... And among
+other desirable things she had, it seemed, pounced upon and captured
+Lady Marayne.
+
+At any rate it was clear that that awful hostile silence and aloofness
+was to end. Benham never quite mastered how it was done. But Amanda
+had gone in one morning to Desborough Street, very sweetly and
+chastely dressed, had abased herself and announced a possible (though
+subsequently disproved) grandchild. And she had appreciated the little
+lady so highly and openly, she had so instantly caught and reproduced
+her tone, that her success, though only temporary in its completeness,
+was immediate. In the afternoon Benham was amazed by the apparition of
+his mother amidst the scattered unsettled furnishings of the new home
+Amanda had chosen in Lancaster Gate. He was in the hall, the door stood
+open awaiting packing-cases from a van without. In the open doorway she
+shone, looking the smallest of dainty things. There was no effect of her
+coming but only of her having arrived there, as a little blue butterfly
+will suddenly alight on a flower.
+
+“Well, Poff!” said Lady Marayne, ignoring abysses, “What are you up to
+now, Poff? Come and embrace me....”
+
+“No, not so,” she said, “stiffest of sons....”
+
+She laid hold of his ears in the old fashion and kissed one eye.
+
+“Congratulations, dear little Poff. Oh! congratulations! In heaps. I'm
+so GLAD.”
+
+Now what was that for?
+
+And then Amanda came out upon the landing upstairs, saw the encounter
+with an involuntary cry of joy, and came downstairs with arms wide open.
+It was the first intimation he had of their previous meeting. He was for
+some minutes a stunned, entirely inadequate Benham....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a few people in the
+Hampstead Garden suburb that she had not the slightest wish to know, and
+then very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of people. The artistic
+circle brought in people, Lady Marayne brought in people; they spread.
+It was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young couple; he would
+certainly do something considerable presently, and she was bright and
+daring, jolly to look at and excellent fun, and, when you came to talk
+to her, astonishingly well informed. They passed from one hostess's hand
+to another: they reciprocated. The Clynes people and the Rushtones took
+her up; Mr. Evesham was amused by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed
+her charm like a trumpet, the Young Liberal people made jealous
+advances, Lord Moggeridge found she listened well, she lit one of the
+brightest weekend parties Lady Marayne had ever gathered at Chexington.
+And her descriptions of recent danger and adventure in Albania not
+only entertained her hearers but gave her just that flavour of personal
+courage which completes the fascination of a young woman. People in the
+gaps of a halting dinner-table conversation would ask: “Have you met
+Mrs. Benham?”
+
+Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking. A smiling and successful young
+woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl with a
+good lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely engaged, or
+at least friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr. Rathbone-Sanders,
+may be forgiven if in the full tide of her success she does not
+altogether grasp the intention of her husband's discourse. It seemed to
+her that he was obsessed by a responsibility for civilization and the
+idea that he was aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined to doubt
+whether he was justified in calling himself aristocratic; at the best
+his mother was county-stuff; but still if he did there was no great
+harm in it nowadays.) Clearly his line was Tory-Democracy, social reform
+through the House of Lords and friendly intimacy with the more spirited
+young peers. And it was only very slowly and reluctantly that she
+was forced to abandon this satisfactory solution of his problem. She
+reproduced all the equipment and comforts of his Finacue Street study in
+their new home, she declared constantly that she would rather forego
+any old social thing than interfere with his work, she never made him
+go anywhere with her without first asking if his work permitted it. To
+relieve him of the burthen of such social attentions she even made a fag
+or so. The making of fags out of manifestly stricken men, the keeping
+of tamed and hopeless admirers, seemed to her to be the most natural and
+reasonable of feminine privileges. They did their useful little services
+until it pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own. That was how she
+put it....
+
+But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
+ignored. He was manifestly losing his temper with her. There was a
+novel austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face on
+certain occasions that lingered in her memory.
+
+He was indeed making elaborate explanations. He said that what he wanted
+to do was to understand “the collective life of the world,” and that
+this was not to be done in a West-End study. He had an extraordinary
+contempt, it seemed, for both sides in the drama of British politics. He
+had extravagant ideas of beginning in some much more fundamental way.
+He wanted to understand this “collective life of the world,” because
+ultimately he wanted to help control it. (Was there ever such nonsense?)
+The practical side of this was serious enough, however; he was back at
+his old idea of going round the earth. Later on that might be rather
+a jolly thing to do, but not until they had struck root a little more
+surely in London.
+
+And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she began
+to realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon this vague
+extravagant research, that all this work she had been doing to make
+a social place for him in London was as nothing to him, that he was
+thinking of himself as separable from her....
+
+“But, Cheetah! How can you leave your spotless leopard? You would howl
+in the lonely jungle!”
+
+“Possibly I shall. But I am going.”
+
+“Then I shall come.”
+
+“No.” He considered her reasons. “You see you are not interested.”
+
+“But I am.”
+
+“Not as I am. You would turn it all into a jolly holiday. You don't want
+to see things as I want to do. You want romance. All the world is a show
+for you. As a show I can't endure it. I want to lay hands on it.”
+
+“But, Cheetah!” she said, “this is separation.”
+
+“You will have your life here. And I shall come back.”
+
+“But, Cheetah! How can we be separated?”
+
+“We are separated,” he said.
+
+Her eyes became round with astonishment. Then her face puckered.
+
+“Cheetah!” she cried in a voice of soft distress, “I love you. What do
+you mean?”
+
+And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and
+shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+“Don't say we are separated,” she whispered, putting her still wet face
+close to his.
+
+“No. We're mates,” he answered softly, with his arm about her.
+
+“How could we ever keep away from each uvver?” she whispered.
+
+He was silent.
+
+“How COULD we?”
+
+He answered aloud. “Amanda,” he said, “I mean to go round the world.”
+
+She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.
+
+“What is to become of me,” she asked suddenly in a voice of despair,
+“while you go round the world? If you desert me in London,” she said,
+“if you shame me by deserting me in London-- If you leave me, I will
+never forgive you, Cheetah! Never.” Then in an almost breathless voice,
+and as if she spoke to herself, “Never in all my days.”
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children. There was
+nothing involuntary about Amanda. “Soon,” she said, “we must begin to
+think of children. Not just now, but a little later. It's good to travel
+and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are children in the
+background. No woman is really content until she is a mother....” And
+for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said about that solitary journey
+round the world.
+
+But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk. She set
+herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there
+were other men in the world. The convenient fags, sometimes a little
+embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought into the
+light before Benham's eyes. Most of them were much older men than
+himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no sane man need
+be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a contemporary, Sir
+Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood and a suggestion of
+Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much in love with Amanda and
+of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible difference of manner that
+made Benham faintly uneasy. He was ashamed of the feeling. Easton it
+seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine honour, so that Amanda could trust
+herself with him to an extent that would have been inadvisable with men
+of a commoner substance, and he had a gift of understanding and sympathy
+that was almost feminine; he could cheer one up when one was lonely and
+despondent. For Amanda was so methodical in the arrangement of her time
+that even in the full rush of a London season she could find an hour
+now and then for being lonely and despondent. And he was a liberal and
+understanding purchaser of the ascendant painters; he understood
+that side of Amanda's interests, a side upon which Benham was notably
+deficient....
+
+“Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?--Sir Philip
+Easton?” said Lady Marayne.
+
+Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said
+nothing.
+
+“When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her,” said Lady Marayne.
+
+“No,” said Benham after consideration. “I don't intend to be a
+wife-herd.”
+
+“What?”
+
+“Wife-herd--same as goat-herd.”
+
+“Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff--nowadays.”
+
+“It's exactly what I mean. I can understand the kind of curator's
+interest an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but
+to spend my days looking after one person who ought to be able to look
+after herself--”
+
+“She's very young.”
+
+“She's quite grown up. Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid.”
+
+“If you leave her about and go abroad--”
+
+“Has she been talking to you, mother?”
+
+“The thing shows.”
+
+“But about my going abroad?”
+
+“She said something, my little Poff.”
+
+Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference
+was something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking
+inordinately. He weighed his words before he spoke again. “If Amanda
+chooses to threaten me with a sort of conditional infidelity, I don't
+see that it ought to change the plans I have made for my life....”
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+“No aristocrat has any right to be jealous,” Benham wrote. “If he
+chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or
+naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel
+her to go his way. What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion
+through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the
+use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no inherent will to
+seek and live the aristocratic life?
+
+“But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call....”
+
+He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
+Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of her,
+the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly
+resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of thinking her
+over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been
+preoccupied with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a
+sense of extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her,
+of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone
+conclusions. He was ready now even with the details of his project. She
+should go on with her life in London exactly as she had planned it. He
+would take fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might
+spend without check or stint as it pleased her. He was going round the
+world for one or two years. It was even possible he would not go alone.
+There was a man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don
+called Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out
+his ideas....
+
+To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should
+happen.
+
+She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily
+told her that this only hardened his heart. She perceived that she must
+make a softer appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive and
+imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the
+first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to
+bear a child. “He cannot go if I am going to have a child,” she told
+herself. But that would mean illness, and for illness in herself or
+others Amanda had the intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet even
+illness would be better than this intolerable publication of her
+husband's ability to leave her side....
+
+She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith
+to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him. Her
+dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.
+
+“Yes,” he said, “I want to have children, but I must go round the world
+none the less.”
+
+She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind. She
+argued with persistence and repetition. And then suddenly so that she
+was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.
+
+She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and she
+was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-forgetful;
+she was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale green, that set off
+her slim erect body and the strong clear lines of her neck and shoulders
+very beautifully, some greenish stones caught a light from without and
+flashed soft whispering gleams from amidst the misty darkness of her
+hair. She was going to Lady Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for
+a dinner at the House with some young Liberals at which he was to meet
+two representative Indians with a grievance from Bengal. Husband and
+wife had but a few moments together. She asked about his company and he
+told her.
+
+“They will tell you about India.”
+
+“Yes.”
+
+She stood for a moment looking out across the lights and the dark green
+trees, and then she turned to him.
+
+“Why cannot I come with you?” she asked with sudden passion. “Why cannot
+I see the things you want to see?”
+
+“I tell you you are not interested. You would only be interested through
+me. That would not help me. I should just be dealing out my premature
+ideas to you. If you cared as I care, if you wanted to know as I want to
+know, it would be different. But you don't. It isn't your fault that
+you don't. It happens so. And there is no good in forced interest, in
+prescribed discovery.”
+
+“Cheetah,” she asked, “what is it that you want to know--that I don't
+care for?”
+
+“I want to know about the world. I want to rule the world.”
+
+“So do I.”
+
+“No, you want to have the world.”
+
+“Isn't it the same?”
+
+“No. You're a greedier thing than I am, you Black Leopard you--standing
+there in the dusk. You're a stronger thing. Don't you know you're
+stronger? When I am with you, you carry your point, because you are more
+concentrated, more definite, less scrupulous. When you run beside me
+you push me out of my path.... You've made me afraid of you.... And so
+I won't go with you, Leopard. I go alone. It isn't because I don't love
+you. I love you too well. It isn't because you aren't beautiful and
+wonderful....”
+
+“But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for this that you want than
+you care for me.”
+
+Benham thought of it. “I suppose I do,” he said.
+
+“What is it that you want? Still I don't understand.”
+
+Her voice had the break of one who would keep reasonable in spite of
+pain.
+
+“I ought to tell you.”
+
+“Yes, you ought to tell me.”
+
+“I wonder if I can tell you,” he said very thoughtfully, and rested his
+hands on his hips. “I shall seem ridiculous to you.”
+
+“You ought to tell me.”
+
+“I think what I want is to be king of the world.”
+
+She stood quite still staring at him.
+
+“I do not know how I can tell you of it. Amanda, do you remember those
+bodies--you saw those bodies--those mutilated men?”
+
+“I saw them,” said Amanda.
+
+“Well. Is it nothing to you that those things happen?”
+
+“They must happen.”
+
+“No. They happen because there are no kings but pitiful kings. They
+happen because the kings love their Amandas and do not care.”
+
+“But what can YOU do, Cheetah?”
+
+“Very little. But I can give my life and all my strength. I can give all
+I can give.”
+
+“But how? How can you help it--help things like that massacre?”
+
+“I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong with my world and rule it
+and set it right.”
+
+“YOU! Alone.”
+
+“Other men do as much. Every one who does so helps others to do so. You
+see--... In this world one may wake in the night and one may resolve to
+be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king. Does that sound
+foolishness to you? Anyhow, it's fair that I should tell you, though
+you count me a fool. This--this kingship--this dream of the night--is
+my life. It is the very core of me. Much more than you are. More than
+anything else can be. I mean to be a king in this earth. KING. I'm not
+mad.... I see the world staggering from misery to misery and there is
+little wisdom, less rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things
+come by chance and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my
+world and I am responsible. Every man to whom this light has come
+is responsible. As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your
+kingship is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no delight,
+except in work, in service, in utmost effort. As far as I can do it I
+will rule my world. I cannot abide in this smug city, I cannot
+endure its self-complacency, its routine, its gloss of success, its
+rottenness.... I shall do little, perhaps I shall do nothing, but what I
+can understand and what I can do I will do. Think of that wild beautiful
+country we saw, and the mean misery, the filth and the warring cruelty
+of the life that lives there, tragedy, tragedy without dignity; and
+think, too, of the limitless ugliness here, and of Russia slipping
+from disorder to massacre, and China, that sea of human beings,
+sliding steadily to disaster. Do you think these are only things in the
+newspapers? To me at any rate they are not things in newspapers; they
+are pain and failure, they are torment, they are blood and dust and
+misery. They haunt me day and night. Even if it is utterly absurd I will
+still do my utmost. It IS absurd. I'm a madman and you and my mother
+are sensible people.... And I will go my way.... I don't care for the
+absurdity. I don't care a rap.”
+
+He stopped abruptly.
+
+“There you have it, Amanda. It's rant, perhaps. Sometimes I feel it's
+rant. And yet it's the breath of life to me.... There you are.... At
+last I've been able to break silence and tell you....”
+
+He stopped with something like a sob and stood regarding the dusky
+mystery of her face. She stood quite still, she was just a beautiful
+outline in the twilight, her face was an indistinctness under the black
+shadow of her hair, with eyes that were two patches of darkness.
+
+He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the time.
+His voice changed. “Well--if you provoke a man enough, you see he makes
+speeches. Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda. Here we are talking instead
+of going to our dinners. The car has been waiting ten minutes.”
+
+Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas....
+
+A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly. In an instant she
+had ceased to plot against him. A vast wave of emotion swept her forward
+to a resolution that astonished her.
+
+“Cheetah!” she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed,
+“give me one thing. Stay until June with me.”
+
+“Why?” he asked.
+
+Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.
+
+“Because--now--no, I don't want to keep you any more--I am not trying to
+hold you any more.... I want....”
+
+She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.
+
+“Cheetah,” she whispered almost inaudibly, “Cheetah--I didn't
+understand. But now--. I want to bear your child.”
+
+He was astonished. “Old Leopard!” he said.
+
+“No,” she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing
+very close to him, “Queen---if I can be--to your King.”
+
+“You want to bear me a child!” he whispered, profoundly moved.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of Commons
+came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer. And over against
+Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of those men who
+know that their judgments are quoted.
+
+“Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?” he asked of
+his neighbour in confidential undertones....
+
+He tittered. “I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY aware
+that the man to her left is talking to her....”
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was now a
+fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer....
+
+All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in
+some way Prothero was necessary to his mind. It was as if he looked to
+Prothero to keep him real. He suspected even while he obeyed that upward
+flourish which was his own essential characteristic. He had a peculiar
+feeling that somehow that upward bias would betray him; that from
+exaltation he might presently float off, into the higher, the better,
+and so to complete unreality. He fled from priggishness and the terror
+of such sublimity alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation to so many
+things Prothero in a peculiar distinctive manner SAW. He had less
+self-control than Benham, less integrity of purpose, less concentration,
+and things that were before his eyes were by the very virtue of these
+defects invariably visible to him. Things were able to insist upon
+themselves with him. Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted
+his purpose too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them. He
+repudiated inconvenient facts. He mastered and made his world; Prothero
+accepted and recorded his. Benham was a will towards the universe where
+Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive activity.
+And it was because of his realization of this profound difference
+between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking Prothero with
+him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision--rather like that
+eye the Graiae used to hand one another....
+
+After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms in
+Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue
+sky, seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholarship pervaded them--a
+little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not
+completely forgotten. Prothero's door had been locked against the world,
+and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only
+apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better
+part of a second. He might have been asleep, he might have been doing
+anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men
+exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before
+Benham' s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host
+to the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects
+of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the
+distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red,
+incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an
+air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE, its cover
+proclaimed....
+
+His host followed that glance and blushed. “They send me all sorts of
+inappropriate stuff to review,” he remarked.
+
+And then he was denouncing celibacy.
+
+The transition wasn't very clear to Benham. His mind had been
+preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project.
+Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between his
+teeth and bolted. He began to say the most shocking things right away,
+so that Benham's attention was caught in spite of himself.
+
+“Inflammatory classics.”
+
+“What's that?”
+
+“Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me,” said Prothero. “I can't
+stand it any longer.”
+
+It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world,
+such a statement might have been credible. Even in his own life,--it was
+now indeed a remote, forgotten stage--there had been something distantly
+akin....
+
+“You're going to marry?”
+
+“I must.”
+
+“Who's the lady, Billy?”
+
+“I don't know. Venus.”
+
+His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly. “So far as I know,
+it is Venus Anadyomene.” A flash of laughter passed across his face
+and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. “I like her
+best, anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! I feel that almost any of them--”
+
+“Tut, tut!” said Benham.
+
+Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.
+
+“Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face? I
+am not pronouncing an immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. I
+am telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I feel. I want--Venus.
+I don't want her to talk to or anything of that sort.... I have been
+studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning,
+instead of doing any work. Would you like to see it?... NO!...
+
+“This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad. It is a peculiarly
+erotic spring. I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend
+to ordinary conversation. These feelings, I understand, are by no means
+peculiar to myself.... No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now
+that the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in you said, 'How
+are you?' I am telling you how I am. You brought it on yourself. Well--I
+am--inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious convictions to assist
+me either to endure or deny this--this urgency. And so why should I deny
+it? It's one of our chief problems here. The majority of my fellow
+dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and
+combination-room are in just the same case as myself. The fever in
+oneself detects the fever in others. I know their hidden thoughts. Their
+fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts. Each covers his
+miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference. A
+tattered cloak.... Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible
+vice of continence--”
+
+“Billy, what's the matter with you?”
+
+Prothero grimaced impatience. “Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a
+humbug, Benham?” he screamed, and in screaming became calmer. “Nature
+taunts me, maddens me. My life is becoming a hell of shame. 'Get out
+from all these books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.' The Flesh,
+Benham. Yes--I insist--the Flesh. Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any
+man a pure spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage,
+with too much port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked
+Aspasia.”
+
+“Mutual, perhaps, Billy.”
+
+“Oh! you can sneer!”
+
+“Well, clearly--Saint Paul is my authority--it's marriage, Billy.”
+
+Prothero had walked to the window. He turned round.
+
+“I CAN'T marry,” he said. “The trouble has gone too far. I've lost my
+nerve in the presence of women. I don't like them any more. They come
+at one--done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about
+all sorts of things that don't matter....” He surveyed his friend's
+thoughtful attitude. “I'm getting to hate women, Benham. I'm beginning
+now to understand the bitterness of spinsters against men. I'm beginning
+to grasp the unkindliness of priests. The perpetual denial. To you,
+happily married, a woman is just a human being. You can talk to her,
+like her, you can even admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge
+against her....”
+
+He sat down abruptly.
+
+Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered him.
+
+“Billy! this is delusion,” he said. “What's come over you?”
+
+“I'm telling you,” said Prothero.
+
+“No,” said Benham.
+
+Prothero awaited some further utterance.
+
+“I'm looking for the cause of it. It's feeding, Billy. It's port and
+stimulants where there is no scope for action. It's idleness. I begin to
+see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser.”
+
+“Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers. Look at that filing
+system like an arsenal of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow
+not idleness.”
+
+“There's still bodily idleness. No. That's your trouble. You're stuffy.
+You've enlarged your liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning after
+an extravagant breakfast--. And peep and covet.”
+
+“Just eggs and bacon!”
+
+“Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. Come out of it, Billy,
+and get aired.”
+
+“How can one?”
+
+“Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!”
+
+“It's an infernally warm morning.
+
+“Walk with me to Grantchester.”
+
+“We might go by boat. You could row.”
+
+“WALK.”
+
+“I ought to do these papers.”
+
+“You weren't doing them.”
+
+“No....”
+
+“Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours
+is--horrid--and just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come
+with me to Russia and about the world. I'm going to leave my wife--”
+
+“Leave your wife!”
+
+“Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead
+you are in this disgusting state. I've never met anything in my life so
+hot and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one
+talk to you?”
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+“You pull things down to your own level,” said Benham as they went
+through the heat to Grantchester.
+
+“I pull them down to truth,” panted Prothero.
+
+“Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and
+discipline and training some sort of falsity!”
+
+“Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride.”
+
+For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....
+
+The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the
+background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
+
+“I'm not talking of Love,” he said, remaining persistently outrageous.
+“I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of
+arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is
+physically possible....
+
+“But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?”
+
+“Then why don't we up and find out?” said Billy.
+
+He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that
+surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came
+to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our
+indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with
+awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in
+particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to
+traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? “What is the wisdom
+of the ages?” said Prothero. “Think of the corners where that wisdom was
+born.... Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise
+man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab
+epileptic....”
+
+“Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?” protested Benham.
+
+The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter
+experience. Most of it was better forgotten. It didn't convince. It had
+never worked things out. In this matter just as in every other matter
+that really signified things had still to be worked out. Nothing had
+been worked out hitherto. The wisdom of the ages was a Cant. People had
+been too busy quarrelling, fighting and running away. There wasn't
+any digested experience of the ages at all. Only the mis-remembered
+hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man.
+
+“Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or
+isn't it?” Prothero demanded. “There's a simple question enough, and is
+there anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages to tell
+me yes or no? Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and vigorous as a
+mated man? Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being? Can she
+be? I don't believe so. Then why in thunder do we let her be? Here am I
+at a centre of learning and wisdom and I don't believe so; and there is
+nothing in all our colleges, libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here,
+to settle that plain question for me, plainly and finally. My life is a
+grubby torment of cravings because it isn't settled. If sexual activity
+IS a part of the balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set
+about making it accessible and harmless and have done with it. Swedish
+exercises. That sort of thing. If it isn't, if it can be reduced and
+done without, then let us set about teaching people HOW to control
+themselves and reduce and get rid of this vehement passion. But all this
+muffled mystery, this pompous sneak's way we take with it!”
+
+“But, Billy! How can one settle these things? It's a matter of
+idiosyncrasy. What is true for one man isn't true for another. There's
+infinite difference of temperaments!”
+
+“Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral code
+for each sort? Why am I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for
+Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like a glove? It isn't
+convenient for me. It fits me like a hair-shirt. Of course there
+are temperaments, but why can't we formulate them and exercise the
+elementary charity of recognizing that one man's health in these matters
+is another man's death? Some want love and gratification and some don't.
+There are people who want children and people who don't want to be
+bothered by children but who are full of vivid desires. There are
+people whose only happiness is chastity, and women who would rather
+be courtesans than mothers. Some of us would concentrate upon a
+single passion or a single idea; others overflow with a
+miscellaneous--tenderness. Yes,--and you smile! Why spit upon and insult
+a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin at it? Why try every one
+by the standards that suit oneself? We're savages, Benham, shamefaced
+savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting.
+
+“I was angry about sex by seventeen,” he went on. “Every year I live I
+grow angrier.”
+
+His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
+
+“Think,” he said, “of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex
+that is going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these
+thousands full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it
+together; we work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and
+casual stories, patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders,
+disease, trouble, escapes; and the next generation will start, and the
+next generation after that will start with nothing but your wisdom of
+the ages, which isn't wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos
+and mystery and the secretive cunning of the savage....
+
+“What I really want to do is my work,” said Prothero, going off quite
+unexpectedly again. “That is why all this business, this incessant
+craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry....”
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+“There I'm with you,” cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent
+of Prothero's prepossessions. “What we want to do is our work.”
+
+He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting
+the word again.
+
+“It's this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--living
+the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of
+this business. If it was only submission.... YOU think it is only
+submission--giving way.... It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all
+right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't
+know all the time that there was something else to live for,
+something far more important. And different. Absolutely different
+and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these
+considerations. It won't fit in.... I don't know what this other thing
+is; it's what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS, in
+all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands control, it demands continence,
+it insists upon disregard.”
+
+But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to
+Prothero that day.
+
+“Mankind,” said Benham, “is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates
+us. It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent
+necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as
+being married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love
+story....”
+
+“Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied,” said Prothero,
+sticking stoutly to his own view.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester
+after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and
+recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the
+imagination of Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero's
+troubles as soar over them. It is the last triumph of the human
+understanding to sympathize with desires we do not share, and to Benham
+who now believed himself to be loved beyond the chances of life, who
+was satisfied and tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible
+that Prothero's demands should seem anything more than the grotesque and
+squalid squealings of the beast that has to be overridden and rejected
+altogether. It is a freakish fact of our composition that these most
+intense feelings in life are just those that are most rapidly and
+completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years, but the magic
+of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives and
+vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was still not
+a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale,
+and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its
+sty....
+
+What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at last he
+could sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the project
+that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.
+
+He had discovered a new reason for travelling. The last country we can
+see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country. It is as hard to see
+one's own country as it is to see the back of one's head. It is too
+much behind us, too much ourselves. But Russia is like England with
+everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked
+about St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage
+untamed London on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal
+cities, like no other capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings
+mingled in their effects. Like London it looked over the heads of
+its own people to a limitless polyglot empire. And Russia was an
+aristocratic land, with a middle-class that had no pride in itself as a
+class; it had a British toughness and incompetence, a British disregard
+of logic and meticulous care. Russia, like England, was outside Catholic
+Christendom, it had a state church and the opposition to that church was
+not secularism but dissent. One could draw a score of such contrasted
+parallels. And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid
+bare the elemental facts of a great social organization. It was having
+its South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a
+certain defeat instead of a dubious victory....
+
+“There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in
+England,” said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.
+
+Benham went on with his discourse about Russia....
+
+“At the college of Troitzka,” said Prothero, “which I understand is a
+kind of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me
+that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the
+arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are
+conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality.”
+
+Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.
+
+He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation.
+He led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try
+to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty
+of every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much. And so he
+was going, and if Prothero cared to come too--
+
+“Yes,” said Prothero, “I should like to go to Russia.”
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was never
+able to lift Prothero away from his obsession. It was the substance of
+their talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting destroyers and
+winking beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the smoothly undulating
+darkness of the North Sea; it rose upon them again as they sat over
+the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in the express for Berlin.
+Prothero filled the Sieges Allee with his complaints against nature
+and society, and distracted Benham in his contemplation of Polish
+agriculture from the windows of the train with turgid sexual liberalism.
+So that Benham, during this period until Prothero left him and until
+the tragic enormous spectacle of Russia in revolution took complete
+possession of him, was as it were thinking upon two floors. Upon the one
+he was thinking of the vast problems of a society of a hundred million
+people staggering on the verge of anarchy, and upon the other he was
+perplexed by the feverish inattention of Prothero to the tremendous
+things that were going on all about them. It was only presently when the
+serenity of his own private life began to be ruffled by disillusionment,
+that he began to realize the intimate connexion of these two systems of
+thought. Yet Prothero put it to him plainly enough.
+
+“Inattentive,” said Prothero, “of course I am inattentive. What is
+really the matter with all this--this social mess people are in here, is
+that nearly everybody is inattentive. These Big Things of yours, nobody
+is thinking of them really. Everybody is thinking about the Near Things
+that concern himself.”
+
+“The bombs they threw yesterday? The Cossacks and the whips?”
+
+“Nudges. Gestures of inattention. If everybody was thinking of the Res
+Publica would there be any need for bombs?”
+
+He pursued his advantage. “It's all nonsense to suppose people think of
+politics because they are in 'em. As well suppose that the passengers on
+a liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war. Before men can
+think of to-morrow, they must think of to-day. Before they can think
+of others, they must be sure about themselves. First of all, food; the
+private, the personal economic worry. Am I safe for food? Then sex, and
+until one is tranquil and not ashamed, not irritated and dissatisfied,
+how can one care for other people, or for next year or the Order of the
+World? How can one, Benham?”
+
+He seized the illustration at hand. “Here we are in Warsaw--not a month
+after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging. Windows have still to be
+mended, smashed doors restored. There's blood-stains still on some
+of the houses. There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and in the
+Ochrana prison. This morning there were executions. Is it anything more
+than an eddy in the real life of the place? Watch the customers in the
+shops, the crowd in the streets, the men in the cafes who stare at the
+passing women. They are all swallowed up again in their own business.
+They just looked up as the Cossacks galloped past; they just shifted a
+bit when the bullets spat....”
+
+And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing
+adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide of
+the private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him back to
+Cambridge--changed.
+
+Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
+disregard Prothero. He was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble
+of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the hurrying
+darknesses of an approaching storm. In those days it looked as though it
+must be an overwhelming storm. He was drinking in the wide and massive
+Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the entangling streets, the
+houses with their strange lettering in black and gold, the innumerable
+barbaric churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the sombre red fortress
+of the Kremlin, with its bulbous churches clustering up into the sky,
+the crosses, the innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil,
+carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of permissible caricature,
+and in this setting the obscure drama of clustering, staring,
+sash-wearing peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand
+varieties of uniform, a running and galloping to and fro of messengers,
+a flutter of little papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and
+portentous, a gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on
+to a perpetual clash and clamour of bells. Benham had brought letters of
+introduction to a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed. They
+were “away,” the porters said, and they continued to be “away,”--it was
+the formula, he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few showed
+themselves extraordinarily anxious to inform him about things, to
+explain themselves and things about them exhaustively. One young student
+took him to various meetings and showed him in great detail the scene of
+the recent murder of the Grand Duke Sergius. The buildings opposite the
+old French cannons were still under repair. “The assassin stood just
+here. The bomb fell there, look! right down there towards the gate; that
+was where they found his arm. He was torn to fragments. He was scraped
+up. He was mixed with the horses....”
+
+Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter of
+days or at the utmost weeks. And whatever question Benham chose to
+ask these talkers were prepared to answer. Except one. “And after the
+revolution,” he asked, “what then?...” Then they waved their hands, and
+failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.
+
+He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous drift
+towards a conflict. He was trying to piece together a process, if it
+was one and the same process, which involved riots in Lodz, fighting at
+Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal battlings in Manchuria,
+the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in the
+Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was trying to rationalize
+it all in his mind, to comprehend its direction. He was struggling
+strenuously with the obscurities of the language in which these things
+were being discussed about him, a most difficult language demanding new
+sets of visual images because of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder
+that for a time he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some
+entirely disconnected affair.
+
+They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre Square.
+Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-looking men
+with peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's friends and
+guides to take him out and show him this and that. At first Prothero
+always accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then he began to make
+excuses. He would stay behind in the hotel. Then when Benham returned
+Prothero would have disappeared. When the porter was questioned about
+Prothero his nescience was profound.
+
+One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who
+wanted to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was
+alarmed.
+
+“Moscow is a late place,” said Benham's student friend. “You need not
+be anxious until after four or five in the morning. It will be quite
+time--QUITE time to be anxious to-morrow. He may be--close at hand.”
+
+When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him
+sleepy and irritable.
+
+“I don't trouble if YOU are late,” said Prothero, sitting up in his bed
+with a red resentful face and crumpled hair. “I wasn't born yesterday.”
+
+“I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow.”
+
+“I don't want to leave Moscow.”
+
+“But Odessa--Odessa is the centre of interest just now.”
+
+“I want to stay in Moscow.”
+
+Benham looked baffled.
+
+Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon them.
+“I don't want to leave Moscow,” he said, “and I'm not going to do so.”
+
+“But haven't we done--”
+
+Prothero interrupted. “You may. But I haven't. We're not after the
+same things. Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest me. I've
+found--different things.”
+
+His expression was extraordinarily defiant.
+
+“I want,” he went on, “to put our affairs on a different footing. Now
+you've opened the matter we may as well go into it. You were good enough
+to bring me here.... There was a sort of understanding we were working
+together.... We aren't.... The long and short of it is, Benham, I want
+to pay you for my journey here and go on my own--independently.”
+
+His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly
+incredible in him.
+
+Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters
+jerked back into Benham's memory. It popped back so suddenly that for an
+instant he wanted to laugh. He turned towards the window, picked his
+way among Prothero's carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment
+staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing
+fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS. Then he
+turned.
+
+“Billy,” he said, “didn't I see you the other evening driving towards
+the Hermitage?”
+
+“Yes,” said Prothero, and added, “that's it.”
+
+“You were with a lady.”
+
+“And she IS a lady,” said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face
+twitched as though he was going to weep.
+
+“She's a Russian?”
+
+“She had an English mother. Oh, you needn't stand there and look so
+damned ironical! She's--she's a woman. She's a thing of kindness....”
+
+He was too full to go on.
+
+“Billy, old boy,” said Benham, distressed, “I don't want to be
+ironical--”
+
+Prothero had got his voice again.
+
+“You'd better know,” he said, “you'd better know. She's one of those
+women who live in this hotel.”
+
+“Live in this hotel!”
+
+“On the fourth floor. Didn't you know? It's the way in most of these big
+Russian hotels. They come down and sit about after lunch and dinner. A
+woman with a yellow ticket. Oh! I don't care. I don't care a rap. She's
+been kind to me; she's--she's dear to me. How are you to understand? I
+shall stop in Moscow. I shall take her to England. I can't live without
+her, Benham. And then-- And then you come worrying me to come to your
+damned Odessa!”
+
+And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face
+as though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an
+apoplectic moment burst noisily into tears. They ran between his
+fingers. “Get out of my room,” he shouted, suffocatingly. “What business
+have you to come prying on me?”
+
+Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared
+round-eyed at his friend. His hands were in his pockets. For a time he
+said nothing.
+
+“Billy,” he began at last, and stopped again. “Billy, in this country
+somehow one wants to talk like a Russian. Billy, my dear--I'm not your
+father, I'm not your judge. I'm--unreasonably fond of you. It's not my
+business to settle what is right or wrong for you. If you want to stay
+in Moscow, stay in Moscow. Stay here, and stay as my guest....”
+
+He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.
+
+“I didn't know,” said Prothero brokenly; “I didn't know it was possible
+to get so fond of a person....”
+
+Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
+abominable in his life before.
+
+“I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I'll make things all right here
+before I go....”
+
+He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound thought to
+his own room....
+
+Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to
+explain what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about the
+room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.
+
+In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to have
+shrunken to something sleek and small.
+
+“I wish,” he said, “you could stay for a later train and have lunch and
+meet her. She's not the ordinary thing. She's--different.”
+
+Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. “Billy,” he said, “no woman IS the
+ordinary thing. They are all--different....”
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as
+disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any
+matter to be. While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and travelled
+hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in the endless
+tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero
+was lost to all those large issues in the development of his personal
+situation. He contributed nothing to Benham's thought except attempts at
+discouragement. He reiterated his declaration that all the vast
+stress and change of Russian national life was going on because it was
+universally disregarded. “I tell you, as I told you before, that nobody
+is attending. You think because all Moscow, all Russia, is in the
+picture, that everybody is concerned. Nobody is concerned. Nobody cares
+what is happening. Even the men who write in newspapers and talk at
+meetings about it don't care. They are thinking of their dinners, of
+their clothes, of their money, of their wives. They hurry home....”
+
+That was his excuse.
+
+Manifestly it was an excuse.
+
+His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy and
+divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible. To
+Benham in those days everything was very simple in this business of
+love. The aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all. He had to love
+Amanda. He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in
+love, he felt, than they had ever been before. They were now writing
+love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation that was almost
+voluptuous. She found in the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to
+him and to the natural fate of women, a delightful exercise for her very
+considerable powers of expression. Life pointed now wonderfully to the
+great time ahead when there would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and
+meanwhile the Cheetah loped about the wild world upon a mighty quest. In
+such terms she put it. Such foolishness written in her invincibly square
+and youthful hand went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up
+against his return in the porter's office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or
+pursued him down through the jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or
+waited for him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his journeyings
+wastefully or in several instances went altogether astray. Perhaps they
+supplied self-educating young strikers in the postal service with useful
+exercises in the deciphering of manuscript English. He wrote back five
+hundred different ways of saying that he loved her extravagantly....
+
+It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and
+solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world;
+Heroic Love to its highest note--and then you go about your business. It
+seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin high and diffuse
+a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate multitudes who stewed in
+affliction and hate because they had failed as yet to find this simple,
+culminating elucidation. And Prothero--Prothero, too, was now achieving
+the same grand elementariness, out of his lusts and protests and general
+physical squalor he had flowered into love. For a time it is true it
+made rather an ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere
+goose-stepping for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay
+exaltation. Benham had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this
+Anglo-Russian, who was a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had
+seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him,
+and his impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with
+dusky hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her,
+a quiet alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda. And
+if she liked old Prothero-- And, indeed, she must like old Prothero or
+could she possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?
+
+They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero's soul
+would wake up and face the world again. What did it matter what she had
+been?
+
+Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained anxiety
+and the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering towards
+revolution, Benham went with his own love like a lamp within him
+and this affair of Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was quite
+prepared for the most sympathetic and liberal behaviour when he came
+back to Moscow to make the lady's acquaintance. He intended to help
+Prothero to marry and take her back to Cambridge, and to assist by every
+possible means in destroying and forgetting the official yellow ticket
+that defined her status in Moscow. But he reckoned without either
+Prothero or the young lady in this expectation.
+
+It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations
+that there were obscure obstacles to this manifest course. Prothero
+hesitated; the lady expressed doubts.
+
+On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished. It was
+chiefly a similarity of complexion. She had a more delicate face than
+Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none of
+Amanda's glow, and she spoke her mother's language with a pretty halting
+limp that was very different from Amanda's clear decisions.
+
+She put her case compactly.
+
+“I would not DO in Cambridge,” she said with an infinitesimal glance at
+Prothero.
+
+“Mr. Benham,” she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman
+of affairs, “now do you see me in Cambridge? Now do you see me? Kept
+outside the walls? In a little DATCHA? With no occupation? Just to amuse
+him.”
+
+And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved
+still completer lucidity.
+
+“I would come if I thought he wanted me to come,” she said. “But you see
+if I came he would not want me to come. Because then he would have me
+and so he wouldn't want me. He would just have the trouble. And I am not
+sure if I should be happy in Cambridge. I am not sure I should be happy
+enough to make him happy. It is a very learned and intelligent and
+charming society, of course; but here, THINGS HAPPEN. At Cambridge
+nothing happens--there is only education. There is no revolution in
+Cambridge; there are not even sinful people to be sorry for.... And
+he says himself that Cambridge people are particular. He says they are
+liberal but very, very particular, and perhaps I could not always act my
+part well. Sometimes I am not always well behaved. When there is music I
+behave badly sometimes, or when I am bored. He says the Cambridge people
+are so liberal that they do not mind what you are, but he says they are
+so particular that they mind dreadfully how you are what you are.... So
+that it comes to exactly the same thing....”
+
+“Anna Alexievna,” said Benham suddenly, “are you in love with Prothero?”
+
+Her manner became conscientiously scientific.
+
+“He is very kind and very generous--too generous. He keeps sending for
+more money--hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him.”
+
+“Were you EVER in love?”
+
+“Of course. But it's all gone long ago. It was like being hungry. Only
+very fine hungry. Exquisite hungry.... And then being disgusted....”
+
+“He is in love with you.”
+
+“What is love?” said Anna. “He is grateful. He is by nature grateful.”
+ She smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who looks down on
+her bambino.
+
+“And you love nothing?”
+
+“I love Russia--and being alone, being completely alone. When I am dead
+perhaps I shall be alone. Not even my own body will touch me then.”
+
+Then she added, “But I shall be sorry when he goes.”
+
+Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone. “Your Anna,” he said, “is
+rather wonderful. At first, I tell you now frankly I did not like her
+very much, I thought she looked 'used,' she drank vodka at lunch, she
+was gay, uneasily; she seemed a sham thing. All that was prejudice. She
+thinks; she's generous, she's fine.”
+
+“She's tragic,” said Prothero as though it was the same thing.
+
+He spoke as though he noted an objection. His next remark confirmed this
+impression. “That's why I can't take her back to Cambridge,” he said.
+
+“You see, Benham,” he went on, “she's human. She's not really feminine.
+I mean, she's--unsexed. She isn't fitted to be a wife or a mother any
+more. We've talked about the possible life in England, very plainly.
+I've explained what a household in Cambridge would mean.... It doesn't
+attract her.... In a way she's been let out from womanhood, forced out
+of womanhood, and I see now that when women are let out from womanhood
+there's no putting them back. I could give a lecture on Anna. I see
+now that if women are going to be wives and mothers and homekeepers and
+ladies, they must be got ready for it from the beginning, sheltered,
+never really let out into the wild chances of life. She has been.
+Bitterly. She's REALLY emancipated. And it's let her out into a sort of
+nothingness. She's no longer a woman, and she isn't a man. She ought
+to be able to go on her own--like a man. But I can't take her back to
+Cambridge. Even for her sake.”
+
+His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.
+
+“You won't be happy in Cambridge--alone,” said Benham.
+
+“Oh, damnably not! But what can I do? I had at first some idea of coming
+to Moscow for good--teaching.”
+
+He paused. “Impossible. I'm worth nothing here. I couldn't have kept
+her.”
+
+“Then what are you going to do, Billy?”
+
+“I don't KNOW what I'm going to do, I tell you. I live for the moment.
+To-morrow we are going out into the country.”
+
+“I don't understand,” said Benham with a gesture of resignation. “It
+seems to me that if a man and woman love each other--well, they insist
+upon each other. What is to happen to her if you leave her in Moscow?”
+
+“Damnation! Is there any need to ask that?”
+
+“Take her to Cambridge, man. And if Cambridge objects, teach Cambridge
+better manners.”
+
+Prothero's face was suddenly transfigured with rage.
+
+“I tell you she won't come!” he said.
+
+“Billy!” said Benham, “you should make her!”
+
+“I can't.”
+
+“If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything--”
+
+“But I don't love her like that,” said Prothero, shrill with anger. “I
+tell you I don't love her like that.”
+
+Then he lunged into further deeps. “It's the other men,” he said, “it's
+the things that have been. Don't you understand? Can't you understand?
+The memories--she must have memories--they come between us. It's
+something deeper than reason. It's in one's spine and under one's nails.
+One could do anything, I perceive, for one's very own woman....”
+
+“MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.
+
+“I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How could any man make her
+his very own woman now? You--you don't seem to understand--ANYTHING.
+She's nobody's woman--for ever. That--that might-have-been has gone for
+ever.... It's nerves--a passion of the nerves. There's a cruelty in life
+and-- She's KIND to me. She's so kind to me....”
+
+And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken
+fragments in letters. When he looked for Anna Alexievna in December--he
+never learnt her surname--he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar
+soon after Prothero's departure and he could not find whither she had
+gone. He never found her again. Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.
+
+Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion. But
+Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock
+to Benham's ideas. It was clear he went off almost callously; it would
+seem there was very little crying. Towards the end it was evident that
+the two had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very end of all. It
+was almost as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go.
+Then came regret, a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with
+every mile of distance.
+
+In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero. He had some hours
+there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy
+with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious
+secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant
+resemblance to Anna....
+
+In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back.
+“But now I had the damned frontier,” he wrote, “between us.”
+
+It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the
+“damned frontier” tip the balance against him.
+
+Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it
+seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured. “I can't stand this
+business,” he wrote. “It has things in it, possibilities of emotional
+disturbance--you can have no idea! In the train--luckily I was alone in
+the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it,
+I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar! A beastly German came and
+stood in the corridor to stare. I had to get out of the train. It is
+disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this....
+
+“Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you
+about my dismal feelings....”
+
+After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but
+to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable
+regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of
+his friend. Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.
+
+“There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris,” he wrote. “A levity.
+I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet undescribed
+radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of those
+tear-compelling German emanations....
+
+“And, Benham, I have found a friend.
+
+“A woman. Of course you will laugh, you will sneer. You do not
+understand these things.... Yet they are so simple. It was the strangest
+accident brought us together. There was something that drew us together.
+A sort of instinct. Near the Boulevard Poissoniere....”
+
+“Good heavens!” said Benham. “A sort of instinct!”
+
+“I told her all about Anna!”
+
+“Good Lord!” cried Benham.
+
+“She understood. Perfectly. None of your so-called 'respectable' women
+could have understood.... At first I intended merely to talk to her....”
+
+Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.
+
+“Little Anna Alexievna!” he said, “you were too clean for him.”
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel
+meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief,
+to the grey mildness of Trinity. He saw him, capped and gowned,
+and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming
+friendships.
+
+The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts
+and restrained celibates at the high tables. They ate on in their mature
+wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled. Presently they would
+withdraw processionally to the combination room....
+
+There would be much to talk about over the wine.
+
+Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow....
+
+He laughed abruptly.
+
+And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space
+of years. There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost
+in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office. Perhaps
+to this day they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in
+Kishinev or Ekaterinoslav....
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+In November, after an adventure in the trader's quarter of Kieff which
+had brought him within an inch of death, and because an emotional wave
+had swept across him and across his correspondence with Amanda, Benham
+went back suddenly to England and her. He wanted very greatly to see her
+and also he wanted to make certain arrangements about his property. He
+returned by way of Hungary, and sent telegrams like shouts of excitement
+whenever the train stopped for a sufficient time. “Old Leopard, I am
+coming, I am coming,” he telegraphed, announcing his coming for the
+fourth time. It was to be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the
+mutual refreshment of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to
+Russia again.
+
+Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the utmost
+dignity of expectant maternity. Like many other people he had been a
+little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a common human
+experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a rare and
+sacramental function. Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey,
+dove-like tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had given way to
+a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, her brisk little neck that had
+always reminded him of the stalk of a flower was now softened and
+rounded; her eyes were tender, and she moved about the place in the
+manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the
+scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and
+a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic,
+half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled
+immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside
+he found--it had been put there for him by Amanda--among much
+other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all
+philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.
+
+Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the impending
+fact. An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in
+the depths of London society, but to make up for his absence Mrs. Morris
+had taken a little cottage down by the river and the Wilder girls were
+with her, both afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it seemed,
+and more particularly Betty, prepared to be keenly critical of Benham's
+attitude.
+
+He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had
+returned in a rather different vein of exaltation.
+
+In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments an
+effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed. It was as if she
+put aside for him something official, something sincerely maintained,
+necessary, but at times a little irksome. It was as if she was glad to
+take him into her confidence and unbend. Within the pre-natal Amanda an
+impish Amanda still lingered.
+
+There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must never
+know....
+
+But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most unpontifical
+moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him
+home across Europe. At times she was extraordinarily jolly. They had two
+or three happy walks about the Chexington woods; that year the golden
+weather of October had flowed over into November, and except for a
+carpet of green and gold under the horse-chestnuts most of the leaves
+were still on the trees. Gleams of her old wanton humour shone on him.
+And then would come something else, something like a shadow across the
+world, something he had quite forgotten since his idea of heroic love
+had flooded him, something that reminded him of those long explanations
+with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that had never been explained, and of the
+curate in the doorway of the cottage and his unaccountable tears.
+
+On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little surprised
+to find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into the garden, with
+an accustomed familiarity. Sir Philip perceived him with a start that
+was instantly controlled, and greeted him with unnatural ease.
+
+Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket in
+the neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending the
+summer, the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from scholars
+and literary men. A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought to have been
+aviating or travelling.
+
+Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that there
+was a flavour of established association in their manner. But then Sir
+Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne. She called him “Pip,”
+ and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-court to him, “Pip!” And
+then he called her “Amanda.” When the Wilder girls came up to join the
+tennis he was just as brotherly....
+
+The next day he came to lunch.
+
+During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been before
+of the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes. They
+watched him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that seemed at
+once pained and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind
+of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably
+suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon
+Sir Philip would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up
+and go away in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he
+could be spoken to he contrived to speak to Benham.
+
+They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took advantage
+of a pause to commit his little indiscretion.
+
+“Mrs. Benham,” he said, “looks amazingly well--extraordinarily well,
+don't you think?”
+
+“Yes,” said Benham, startled. “Yes. She certainly keeps very well.”
+
+“She misses you terribly,” said Sir Philip; “it is a time when a woman
+misses her husband. But, of course, she does not want to hamper your
+work....”
+
+Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest in
+these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no better
+expression for this than a grunt.
+
+“You don't mind,” said the young man with a slight catch in the breath
+that might have been apprehensive, “that I sometimes bring her books and
+flowers and things? Do what little I can to keep life interesting down
+here? It's not very congenial.... She's so wonderful--I think she is the
+most wonderful woman in the world.”
+
+Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was
+really a primitive barbarian in these matters.
+
+“I've no doubt,” he said, “that my wife has every reason to be grateful
+for your attentions.”
+
+In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir Philip
+was engendering something still more personal. If so, he might
+be constrained to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of
+chrysanthemums over Sir Philip's head, or kick him in an improving
+manner. He had a ridiculous belief that Sir Philip would probably take
+anything of the sort very touchingly. He scrambled in his mind for some
+remark that would avert this possibility.
+
+“Have you ever been in Russia?” he asked hastily. “It is the most
+wonderful country in Europe. I had an odd adventure near Kiev. During a
+pogrom.”
+
+And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description....
+
+But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were presently
+thrown out by Lady Marayne. They were so much more in the air....
+
+
+
+18
+
+
+Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had foreseen.
+
+“Easton has gone away,” he remarked three days later to Amanda.
+
+“I told him to go. He is a bore with you about. But otherwise he is
+rather a comfort, Cheetah.” She meditated upon Sir Philip. “And he's an
+HONOURABLE man,” she said. “He's safe....”
+
+
+
+19
+
+
+After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in
+earnest. The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic love for
+the modern aristocrat ended abruptly. Instead there came the first draft
+for a study of jealousy. The note was written in pencil on Chexington
+notepaper and manifestly that had been supported on the ribbed cover
+of a book. There was a little computation in the corner, converting
+forty-five degrees Reaumur into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White
+guess it had been written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it had been
+written in a rather amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's
+journey to the gathering revolt in Moscow....
+
+“I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual
+jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible,
+something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort
+to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so
+easily settled with....
+
+“One likes to know.... Possibly one wants to know too much.... In phases
+of fatigue, and particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one
+is leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an irrational
+torment....
+
+“And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of this
+base motive. I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how strongly
+jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with a
+man....
+
+“There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human being
+being one's ownest own--utterly one's own....
+
+“There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives....
+
+“One does....
+
+“There is something dishonouring in distrust--to both the distrusted and
+the one who distrusts....”
+
+After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.
+
+
+
+20
+
+
+Benham did not see Amanda again until after the birth of their child.
+He spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the fitful
+fighting and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and taking
+care of a lost and helpless English family whose father had gone astray
+temporarily on the way home from Baku. Then he went southward to Rostov
+and thence to Astrakhan. Here he really began his travels. He determined
+to get to India by way of Herat and for the first time in his life
+rode out into an altogether lawless wilderness. He went on obstinately
+because he found himself disposed to funk the journey, and because
+discouragements were put in his way. He was soon quite cut off from all
+the ways of living he had known. He learnt what it is to be flea-bitten,
+saddle-sore, hungry and, above all, thirsty. He was haunted by a dread
+of fever, and so contrived strange torments for himself with overdoses
+of quinine. He ceased to be traceable from Chexington in March, and he
+reappeared in the form of a telegram from Karachi demanding news in May.
+He learnt he was the father of a man-child and that all was well with
+Amanda.
+
+He had not expected to be so long away from any communication with the
+outer world, and something in the nature of a stricken conscience took
+him back to England. He found a second William Porphyry in the world,
+dominating Chexington, and Amanda tenderly triumphant and passionate,
+the Madonna enthroned. For William Porphyry he could feel no emotion.
+William Porphyry was very red and ugly and protesting, feeble and
+aggressive, a matter for a skilled nurse. To see him was to ignore him
+and dispel a dream. It was to Amanda Benham turned again.
+
+For some days he was content to adore his Madonna and listen to the
+familiar flatteries of her love. He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda
+said, and wiser, so that she was afraid of him....
+
+And then he became aware that she was requiring him to stay at her side.
+“We have both had our adventures,” she said, which struck him as an odd
+phrase.
+
+It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those
+conceptions of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so
+clearly understood between them had vanished from her mind. She had
+absolutely forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had seemed
+to him the crowning instant, the real marriage of their lives. It
+had gone, it had left no recoverable trace in her. And upon his
+interpretations of that he had loved her passionately for a year. She
+was back at exactly the ideas and intentions that ruled her during their
+first settlement in London. She wanted a joint life in the social world
+of London, she demanded his presence, his attention, the daily practical
+evidences of love. It was all very well for him to be away when the
+child was coming, but now everything was different. Now he must stay by
+her.
+
+This time he argued no case. These issues he had settled for ever. Even
+an indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation that began
+with appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him. Behind these things
+now was India. The huge problems of India had laid an unshakeable hold
+upon his imagination. He had seen Russia, and he wanted to balance that
+picture by a vision of the east....
+
+He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington. The young man
+displayed no further disposition to be confidentially sentimental. But
+he seemed to have something on his mind. And Amanda said not a word
+about him. He was a young man above suspicion, Benham felt....
+
+And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these
+two larger carnivores began to change. Except for the repetition of
+accustomed endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense of
+the word. They dealt chiefly with the “Cub,” and even there Benham felt
+presently that the enthusiasm diminished. A new amazing quality for
+Amanda appeared--triteness. The very writing of her letters changed
+as though it had suddenly lost backbone. Her habitual liveliness
+of phrasing lost its point. Had she lost her animation? Was she ill
+unknowingly? Where had the light gone? It was as if her attention was
+distracted.... As if every day when she wrote her mind was busy about
+something else.
+
+Abruptly at last he understood. A fact that had never been stated,
+never formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to
+convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question
+perceived to be THERE....
+
+He left a record of that moment of realization.
+
+“Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had
+never seen Amanda before. Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with that
+same dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a pitiless, a
+scientific distinctness that has neither light nor shadow....
+
+“Of course,” I said, and then presently I got up very softly....
+
+“I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin. I wanted
+to feel the largeness of the sky. I went out upon the deck. We were off
+the coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment, there comes back
+to me also the faint flavour of spice in the air, the low line of the
+coast, the cool flooding abundance of the Indian moonlight, the swish
+of the black water against the side of the ship. And a perception of
+infinite loss, as if the limitless heavens above this earth and below
+to the very uttermost star were just one boundless cavity from which
+delight had fled....
+
+“Of course I had lost her. I knew it with absolute certainty. I knew it
+from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her needs. I knew it
+from every line she had written me in the last three months. I knew it
+intuitively. She had been unfaithful. She must have been unfaithful.
+
+“What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?”
+
+
+
+21
+
+
+“Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters. Let me
+be at least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I may
+have been led into by force of my passions. Always I have despised
+jealousy....
+
+“Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the aristocratic
+life to be achieved. They come in a certain order, and in that order the
+spirit of man is armed against them less and less efficiently. Of fear
+and my struggle against fear I have told already. I am fearful. I am a
+physical coward until I can bring shame and anger to my assistance,
+but in overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole body of human
+tradition. Every one, the basest creatures, every Hottentot, every
+stunted creature that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the
+instinctive constitution of man is at fault here and that fear is
+shameful and must be subdued. The race is on one's side. And so there is
+a vast traditional support for a man against the Second Limitation, the
+limitation of physical indulgence. It is not so universal as the first,
+there is a grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness, but common
+pride is against it. And in this matter my temperament has been my help:
+I am fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil
+from excess. It is no great virtue; it happens so; it is something in
+the nerves of my skin. I cannot endure myself unshaven or in any way
+unclean; I am tormented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories,
+and after I had once loved Amanda I could not--unless some irrational
+impulse to get equal with her had caught me--have broken my faith to
+her, whatever breach there was in her faith to me....
+
+“I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more easily
+clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that distinctive
+virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment and anger.
+
+“I despised a jealous man. There is a traditional discredit of jealousy,
+not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very strong. But
+the general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with the
+supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, that it is unreasonable
+suspicion. Given a cause then tradition speaks with an uncertain
+voice....
+
+“I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was
+impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable
+to imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as
+fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my
+image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that she
+was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently,
+gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a pool, that
+knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated up into my
+consciousness.
+
+“And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me! Outrageously. Abominably.
+
+“Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this
+question. My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right
+whatever to her love or loyalty. I must have that very clear....
+
+“This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except accidentally
+here and there, incompatible with the domestic life. It means going
+hither and thither in the universe of thought as much as in the universe
+of matter, it means adventure, it means movement and adventure that must
+needs be hopelessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it means
+self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit into the welfare of a
+family. In all ages, directly society had risen above the level of a
+barbaric tribal village, this need of a release from the family for
+certain necessary types of people has been recognized. It was
+met sometimes informally, sometimes formally, by the growth and
+establishment of special classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of
+pledged knights, of a great variety of non-family people, whose
+concern was the larger collective life that opens out beyond the
+simple necessities and duties and loyalties of the steading and of the
+craftsman's house. Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form
+of celibacy; but besides that there have been a hundred institutional
+variations of the common life to meet the need of the special man,
+the man who must go deep and the man who must go far. A vowed celibacy
+ceased to be a tolerable rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic
+idea entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristocracy means the
+abandonment of the racial future to a proletariat of base unleaderly
+men. That was plain to Plato. It was plain to Campanelea. It was plain
+to the Protestant reformers. But the world has never yet gone on to
+the next step beyond that recognition, to the recognition of feminine
+aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as untrammelled by domestic
+servitudes and family relationships as the men of their kind. That I see
+has always been my idea since in my undergraduate days I came under the
+spell of Plato. It was a matter of course that my first gift to Amanda
+should be his REPUBLIC. I loved Amanda transfigured in that dream....
+
+“There are no such women....
+
+“It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with myself.
+I had no sound reason for supposing that. I did suppose that. I did not
+perceive that not only was she younger than myself, but that while I
+had been going through a mill of steely education, kept close, severely
+exercised, polished by discussion, she had but the weak training of a
+not very good school, some scrappy reading, the vague discussions
+of village artists, and the draped and decorated novelties of the
+'advanced.' It all went to nothing on the impact of the world.... She
+showed herself the woman the world has always known, no miracle, and
+the alternative was for me to give myself to her in the ancient way, to
+serve her happiness, to control her and delight and companion her, or to
+let her go.
+
+“The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm and
+her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home. She demands
+the concentration of a man. Not to be able to command that is her
+failure. Not to give her that is to shame her. As I had shamed
+Amanda....”
+
+
+
+22
+
+
+“There are no such women.” He had written this in and struck it out, and
+then at some later time written it in again. There it stayed now as his
+last persuasion, but it set White thinking and doubting. And, indeed,
+there was another sheet of pencilled broken stuff that seemed to glance
+at quite another type of womanhood.
+
+
+
+23
+
+
+“It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the remaking of
+the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as great as those
+from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes. These women must
+become aristocratic through their own innate impulse, they must be
+self-called to their lives, exactly as men must be; there is no making
+an aristocrat without a predisposition for rule and nobility. And they
+have to discover and struggle against just exactly the limitations that
+we have to struggle against. They have to conquer not only fear
+but indulgence, indulgence of a softer, more insidious quality, and
+jealousy--proprietorship....
+
+“It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand times
+in my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and desired a
+mate. A mate--not a possession. It is a need almost naively simple. If
+only one could have a woman who thought of one and with one! Though
+she were on the other side of the world and busied about a thousand
+things....
+
+“'WITH one,' I see it must be rather than 'OF one.' That 'of one' is
+just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again....
+
+“Man is a mating creature. It is not good to be alone. But mating means
+a mate....
+
+“We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying....
+
+“And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers. 'Dancing
+attendance'--as they used to say. We should meet upon our ways as the
+great carnivores do....
+
+“That at any rate was a sound idea. Though we only played with it.
+
+“But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible
+satisfaction now for me. What is the good of dreaming? Life and chance
+have played a trick upon my body and soul. I am mated, though I am
+mated to a phantom. I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton's Amanda, but
+Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams. Sense, and particularly the
+sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason in us. There can be no mate
+for me now unless she comes with Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and
+Amanda's quick movements and her clever hands....”
+
+
+
+24
+
+
+“Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?
+
+“There were things between us two as lovers,--love, things more
+beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind
+hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression,
+images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight
+in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off
+wonderful music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing
+softly, of floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and
+sudden as the knife of an assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears,
+tears that are happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations,
+gratitudes, sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft
+eyelid closed in sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard
+unexpectedly; sweet, dear magical things that I can find no words
+for....
+
+“If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that she
+was not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that has been
+between us more cheaply than I did? It does not change one jot of it for
+me. At the time she did not hold it cheaply. She forgets where I do not
+forget....”
+
+
+
+25
+
+
+Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.
+
+Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda and
+himself.
+
+He did not at once turn homeward. It was in Ceylon that he dropped his
+work and came home. At Colombo he found a heap of letters awaiting him,
+and there were two of these that had started at the same time. They had
+been posted in London on one eventful afternoon. Lady Marayne and Amanda
+had quarrelled violently. Two earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women,
+full of neat but belated repartee, separated to write their simultaneous
+letters. Each letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.
+Lady Marayne told her story ruthlessly. Amanda, on the other hand,
+generalized, and explained. Sir Philip's adoration of her was a
+love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure. Was there no trust nor
+courage in the world? She would defy all jealous scandal. She would not
+even banish him from her side. Surely the Cheetah could trust her. But
+the pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond Amanda's explaining. The
+little lady's dignity had been stricken. “I have been used as a cloak,”
+ she wrote.
+
+Her phrases were vivid. She quoted the very words of Amanda, words she
+had overheard at Chexington in the twilight. They were no invention.
+They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover. It was as sure as if
+Benham had heard the sound of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen,
+as if she had crept by him, stooping and rustling softly. It brought
+back the living sense of her, excited, flushed, reckless; his
+wild-haired Amanda of infinite delight.... All day those words of hers
+pursued him. All night they flared across the black universe. He buried
+his face in the pillows and they whispered softly in his ear.
+
+He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.
+
+He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the
+stirring quiet of the stars.
+
+He sent no notice of his coming back. Nor did he come back with a
+definite plan. But he wanted to get at Amanda.
+
+
+
+26
+
+
+It was with Amanda he had to reckon. Towards Easton he felt scarcely any
+anger at all. Easton he felt only existed for him because Amanda willed
+to have it so.
+
+Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger. His
+devotion filled Benham with scorn. His determination to serve Amanda at
+any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights for her,
+his humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her moods and
+happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility. That rage
+against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist against a blackleg.
+Are all the women to fall to the men who will be their master-slaves and
+keepers? But it was not simply that Benham felt men must be freed from
+this incessant attendance; women too must free themselves from their
+almost instinctive demand for an attendant....
+
+His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings. Never
+in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and
+won and competed for and fought over. So that it was Amanda he wanted
+to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses
+only to fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and jealous fury.
+But the forces that were driving him home now were the forces below the
+level of reason and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and desire,
+profound aboriginal urgencies. He thought, indeed, very little as he
+lay in his berth or sulked on deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless
+invasion of exasperating images that ever and again would so wring him
+that his muscles would tighten and his hands clench or he would find
+himself restraining a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.
+
+Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole world.
+She filled the skies. She bent over him and mocked him. She became a
+mystery of passion and dark beauty. She was the sin of the world. One
+breathed her in the winds of the sea. She had taken to herself the
+greatness of elemental things....
+
+So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see that
+she was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather tired and
+very frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an evening-dress of
+unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of gold and colour about
+her wrists and neck.
+
+In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him
+homeward. He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has
+greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.
+
+For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to kill
+than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.
+
+
+
+27
+
+
+He took them by surprise. It had been his intention to take them by
+surprise. Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.
+
+He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near Charing
+Cross. In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in Lancaster
+Gate. The butler was deferentially amazed. Mrs. Benham was, he said, at
+a theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought some other people also.
+He did not know when she would be back. She might go on to supper. It
+was not the custom for the servants to wait up for her.
+
+Benham went into the study that reduplicated his former rooms in Finacue
+Street and sat down before the fire the butler lit for him. He sent the
+man to bed, and fell into profound meditation.
+
+It was nearly two o'clock when he heard the sound of her latchkey and
+went out at once upon the landing.
+
+The half-door stood open and Easton's car was outside. She stood in
+the middle of the hall and relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he was
+carrying.
+
+“Good-night,” she said, “I am so tired.”
+
+“My wonderful goddess,” he said.
+
+She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, then started, stared, and
+wrenched herself out of his arms.
+
+Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon them,
+white-faced and inexpressive. Easton dropped back a pace. For a moment
+no one moved nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton shut the half-door
+and shut out the noises of the road.
+
+For some seconds Benham regarded them, and as he did so his spirit
+changed....
+
+Everything he had thought of saying and doing vanished out of his mind.
+
+He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended the staircase. When
+he was five or six steps above them, he spoke. “Just sit down here,” he
+said, with a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself upon the stairs.
+“DO sit down,” he said with a sudden testiness as they continued
+standing. “I know all about this affair. Do please sit down and let us
+talk.... Everybody's gone to bed long ago.”
+
+“Cheetah!” she said. “Why have you come back like this?”
+
+Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet.
+
+“I wish you would sit down, Easton,” he said in a voice of subdued
+savagery.
+
+“Why have you come back?” Sir Philip Easton found his voice to ask.
+
+“SIT down,” Benham spat, and Easton obeyed unwillingly.
+
+“I came back,” Benham went on, “to see to all this. Why else? I
+don't--now I see you--feel very fierce about it. But it has distressed
+me. You look changed, Amanda, and fagged. And your hair is untidy. It's
+as if something had happened to you and made you a stranger.... You two
+people are lovers. Very natural and simple, but I want to get out of it.
+Yes, I want to get out of it. That wasn't quite my idea, but now I see
+it is. It's queer, but on the whole I feel sorry for you. All of us,
+poor humans--. There's reason to be sorry for all of us. We're full
+of lusts and uneasiness and resentments that we haven't the will to
+control. What do you two people want me to do to you? Would you like a
+divorce, Amanda? It's the clean, straight thing, isn't it? Or would the
+scandal hurt you?”
+
+Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on Benham.
+
+“Give us a divorce,” said Easton, looking to her to confirm him.
+
+Amanda shook her head.
+
+“I don't want a divorce,” she said.
+
+“Then what do you want?” asked Benham with sudden asperity.
+
+“I don't want a divorce,” she repeated. “Why do you, after a long
+silence, come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?”
+
+“It was the way it took me,” said Benham, after a little interval.
+
+“You have left me for long months.”
+
+“Yes. I was angry. And it was ridiculous to be angry. I thought I wanted
+to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is to help
+you out of this miserable mess--and then get away from you. You two
+would like to marry. You ought to be married.”
+
+“I would die to make Amanda happy,” said Easton.
+
+“Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make her happy. That you
+may find more of a strain. Less tragic and more tiresome. I, on the
+other hand, want neither to die nor live for her.” Amanda moved sharply.
+“It's extraordinary what amazing vapours a lonely man may get into his
+head. If you don't want a divorce then I suppose things might go on as
+they are now.”
+
+“I hate things as they are now,” said Easton. “I hate this falsehood and
+deception.”
+
+“You would hate the scandal just as much,” said Amanda.
+
+“I would not care what the scandal was unless it hurt you.”
+
+“It would be only a temporary inconvenience,” said Benham. “Every one
+would sympathize with you.... The whole thing is so natural.... People
+would be glad to forget very soon. They did with my mother.”
+
+“No,” said Amanda, “it isn't so easy as that.”
+
+She seemed to come to a decision.
+
+“Pip,” she said. “I want to talk to--HIM--alone.”
+
+Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity. “But why?”
+ he asked.
+
+“I do,” she said.
+
+“But this is a thing for US.”
+
+“Pip, I want to talk to him alone. There is something--something I can't
+say before you....”
+
+Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet.
+
+“Shall I wait outside?”
+
+“No, Pip. Go home. Yes,--there are some things you must leave to me.”
+
+She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the
+younger man. The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to be
+at any cost splendid. He felt--and it was a most unexpected and
+disconcerting feeling--that he was no longer confederated with Amanda;
+that prior, more fundamental and greater associations prevailed over his
+little new grip upon her mind and senses. He stared at husband and wife
+aghast in this realization. Then his resolute romanticism came to his
+help. “I would trust you--” he began. “If you tell me to go--”
+
+Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.
+
+She laid her hand upon his arm. “Go, my dear Pip,” she said. “Go.”
+
+He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham
+as though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen,
+somewhere, he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in a
+gap that otherwise he could not have supplied.
+
+Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly
+dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.
+
+“WELL?” said Benham.
+
+She held out her arms to him.
+
+“Why did you leave me, Cheetah? Why did you leave me?”
+
+
+
+28
+
+
+Benham affected to ignore those proffered arms. But they recalled in
+a swift rush the animal anger that had brought him back to England.
+To remind him of desire now was to revive an anger stronger than any
+desire. He spoke seeking to hurt her.
+
+“I am wondering now,” he said, “why the devil I came back.”
+
+“You had to come back to me.”
+
+“I could have written just as well about these things.”
+
+“CHEETAH,” she said softly, and came towards him slowly, stooping
+forward and looking into his eyes, “you had to come back to see your old
+Leopard. Your wretched Leopard. Who has rolled in the dirt. And is still
+yours.”
+
+“Do you want a divorce? How are we to fix things, Amanda?”
+
+“Cheetah, I will tell you how we will fix things.”
+
+She dropped upon the step below him. She laid her hands with a
+deliberate softness upon him, she gave a toss so that her disordered
+hair was a little more disordered, and brought her soft chin down to
+touch his knees. Her eyes implored him.
+
+“Cheetah,” she said. “You are going to forgive.”
+
+He sat rigid, meeting her eyes.
+
+“Amanda,” he said at last, “you would be astonished if I kicked you away
+from me and trampled over you to the door. That is what I want to do.”
+
+“Do it,” she said, and the grip of her hands tightened. “Cheetah, dear!
+I would love you to kill me.”
+
+“I don't want to kill you.”
+
+Her eyes dilated. “Beat me.”
+
+“And I haven't the remotest intention of making love to you,” he said,
+and pushed her soft face and hands away from him as if he would stand
+up.
+
+She caught hold of him again. “Stay with me,” she said.
+
+He made no effort to shake off her grip. He looked at the dark cloud of
+her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of old delights
+made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as he spoke. “Dear
+Leopard,” he said, “we humans are the most streaky of conceivable
+things. I thought I hated you. I do. I hate you like poison. And also I
+do not hate you at all.”
+
+Then abruptly he was standing over her.
+
+She rose to her knees.
+
+“Stay here, old Cheetah!” she said. “This is your house. I am your
+wife.”
+
+He went towards the unfastened front door.
+
+“Cheetah!” she cried with a note of despair.
+
+He halted at the door.
+
+“Amanda, I will come to-morrow. I will come in the morning, in the sober
+London daylight, and then we will settle things.”
+
+He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled. He spoke as one who
+remarks upon a quite unexpected fact....
+
+“Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human being that I wanted so
+little to kill.”
+
+
+
+29
+
+
+White found a fragment that might have been written within a week of
+those last encounters of Benham and Amanda.
+
+“The thing that astonished me most in Amanda was the change in her
+mental quality.
+
+“With me in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she had
+deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself.
+Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it
+was gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing
+of poses and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei.
+Beneath that surface I could not discover anything individual at all.
+Fear and a grasping quality, such as God gave us all when he gave us
+hands; but the individual I knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard
+was gone. Whither, I cannot imagine. An amazing disappearance. Clean out
+of space and time like a soul lost for ever.
+
+“When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene, she
+acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in reality....
+
+“I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this way,
+by cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she despised....
+There can be no inequality in love. Give and take must balance. One must
+be one's natural self or the whole business is an indecent trick, a vile
+use of life! To use inferiors in love one must needs talk down to
+them, interpret oneself in their insufficient phrases, pretend,
+sentimentalize. And it is clear that unless oneself is to be lost, one
+must be content to leave alone all those people that one can reach
+only by sentimentalizing. But Amanda--and yet somehow I love her for
+it still--could not leave any one alone. So she was always feverishly
+weaving nets of false relationship. Until her very self was forgotten.
+So she will go on until the end. With Easton it had been necessary for
+her to key herself to a simple exalted romanticism that was entirely
+insincere. She had so accustomed herself to these poses that her innate
+gestures were forgotten. She could not recover them; she could not
+even reinvent them. Between us there were momentary gleams as though
+presently we should be our frank former selves again. They were never
+more than momentary....”
+
+And that was all that this astonishing man had seen fit to tell of his
+last parting from his wife.
+
+Perhaps he did Amanda injustice. Perhaps there was a stronger thread
+of reality in her desire to recover him than he supposed. Clearly he
+believed that under the circumstances Amanda would have tried to recover
+anybody.
+
+She had dressed for that morning's encounter in a very becoming and
+intimate wrap of soft mauve and white silk, and she had washed and dried
+her dark hair so that it was a vapour about her face. She set herself
+with a single mind to persuade herself and Benham that they were
+inseparable lovers, and she would not be deflected by his grim
+determination to discuss the conditions of their separation. When he
+asked her whether she wanted a divorce, she offered to throw over
+Sir Philip and banish him for ever as lightly as a great lady might
+sacrifice an objectionable poodle to her connubial peace.
+
+Benham passed through perplexing phases, so that she herself began to
+feel that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands. His initial
+grimness she could understand, and partially its breakdown into
+irritability. But she was puzzled by his laughter. For he laughed
+abruptly.
+
+“You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of tremendous tragedy. And
+really,--you are a Lark.”
+
+And then overriding her altogether, he told her what he meant to do
+about their future and the future of their little son.
+
+“You don't want a divorce and a fuss. Then I'll leave things. I perceive
+I've no intention of marrying any more. But you'd better do the straight
+thing. People forget and forgive. Especially when there is no one about
+making a fuss against you.
+
+“Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for shirking it.
+We'll both be able to get at the boy then. You'll not hurt him, and
+I shall want to see him. It's better for the boy anyhow not to have a
+divorce.
+
+“I'll not stand in your way. I'll get a little flat and I shan't come
+too much to London, and when I do, you can get out of town. You must be
+discreet about Easton, and if people say anything about him, send them
+to me. After all, this is our private affair.
+
+“We'll go on about money matters as we have been going. I trust to you
+not to run me into overwhelming debts. And, of course, if at any time,
+you do want to marry--on account of children or anything--if nobody
+knows of this conversation we can be divorced then....”
+
+Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while Amanda
+gathered her forces for her last appeal.
+
+It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down
+before him and clung to his knees. He struggled ridiculously to get
+himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate on
+the floor with her dishevelled hair about her.
+
+She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark
+Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet
+without. He had come back. The door reopened. There was a slight pause,
+and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the second
+housemaid. There are moments, suspended fragments of time rather than
+links in its succession, when the human eye is more intelligible than
+any words.
+
+The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a click of
+the door.
+
+“DAMN!” said Amanda.
+
+Then slowly she rose to her knees.
+
+She meditated through vast moments.
+
+“It's a cursed thing to be a woman,” said Amanda. She stood up. She put
+her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot about it.
+After another long interval of thought she spoke.
+
+“Cheetah!” she said, “Old Cheetah!...
+
+“I didn't THINK it of you....”
+
+Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a
+reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who
+packs a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.
+
+
+
+30
+
+
+The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in
+Danebury Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham's private
+processes the morning after this affair.
+
+Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London. She
+had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly
+decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to
+behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way. On the
+morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor waiter that the
+occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar in the night, and almost
+immediately she was summoned to see Benham.
+
+He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little
+obscure the condition of the room behind him. He was carefully dressed,
+and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever. But one of his
+hands was tied up in a white bandage.
+
+“I am going this morning,” he said, “I am going down now to breakfast. I
+have had a few little accidents with some of the things in the room and
+I have cut my hand. I want you to tell the manager and see that they are
+properly charged for on the bill.... Thank you.”
+
+The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.
+
+Benham's things were all packed up and the room had an air of having
+been straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive
+cataclysm. One or two items that the chambermaid might possibly have
+overlooked in the normal course of things were carefully exhibited. For
+example, the sheet had been torn into half a dozen strips and they were
+lying side by side on the bed. The clock on the mantelpiece had
+been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded to pieces. All the
+looking-glasses in the room were smashed, apparently the electric lamp
+that stood on the night table by the bedside had been wrenched off and
+flung or hammered about amidst the other breakables. And there was
+a considerable amount of blood splashed about the room. The head
+chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the spectacle and
+summoned her most convenient friend, the head chambermaid on the third
+floor, to her aid. The first-floor waiter joined their deliberations
+and several housemaids displayed a respectful interest in the matter.
+Finally they invoked the manager. He was still contemplating the scene
+of the disorder when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates warned
+him of Benham's return.
+
+Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly
+tranquil.
+
+“I had a kind of nightmare,” he said. “I am fearfully sorry to have
+disarranged your room. You must charge me for the inconvenience as well
+as for the damage.”
+
+
+
+31
+
+
+“An aristocrat cannot be a lover.”
+
+“One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of life
+and the intricacies of another human being. I do not mean that one may
+not love. One loves the more because one does not concentrate one's
+love. One loves nations, the people passing in the street, beasts hurt
+by the wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons in tears....
+
+“But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's hands
+I do not think one can expect to be loved.
+
+“An aristocrat must do without close personal love....”
+
+This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper. The writing ended
+halfway down the page. Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it
+was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter
+that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations. Its incompleteness
+made its expression perfect....
+
+There Benham's love experience ended. He turned to the great business
+of the world. Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like
+Fear they were to be dismissed as far as possible and subdued when
+they could not be altogether dismissed. Whatever stirrings of blood or
+imagination there were in him after that parting, whatever failures from
+this resolution, they left no trace on the rest of his research, which
+was concerned with the hates of peoples and classes and war and peace
+and the possibilities science unveils and starry speculations of what
+mankind may do.
+
+
+
+32
+
+
+But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter
+with Lady Marayne.
+
+The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger and
+distress. Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so hopelessly
+dispersed and mixed. And when for a moment it seemed to him that she was
+not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all, then with an instant
+eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory gleam. “What are you doing
+in England, Poff?” she demanded. “And what are you going to do?
+
+“Nothing! And you are going to leave her in your house, with your
+property and a lover. If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come back?
+And why did you ever marry her? You might have known; her father was a
+swindler. She's begotten of deceit. She'll tell her own story while you
+are away, and a pretty story she'll make of it.”
+
+“Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?”
+
+“I never wanted you to go away from her. If you'd stayed and watched her
+as a man should, as I begged you and implored you to do. Didn't I tell
+you, Poff? Didn't I warn you?”
+
+“But now what am I to do?”
+
+“There you are! That's just a man's way. You get yourself into this
+trouble, you follow your passions and your fancies and fads and then
+you turn to me! How can I help you now, Poff? If you'd listened to me
+before!”
+
+Her blue eyes were demonstratively round.
+
+“Yes, but--”
+
+“I warned you,” she interrupted. “I warned you. I've done all I could
+for you. It isn't that I haven't seen through her. When she came to me
+at first with that made-up story of a baby! And all about loving me like
+her own mother. But I did what I could. I thought we might still make
+the best of a bad job. And then--. I might have known she couldn't leave
+Pip alone.... But for weeks I didn't dream. I wouldn't dream. Right
+under my nose. The impudence of it!”
+
+Her voice broke. “Such a horrid mess! Such a hopeless, horrid mess!”
+
+She wiped away a bright little tear....
+
+“It's all alike. It's your way with us. All of you. There isn't a man
+in the world deserves to have a woman in the world. We do all we can
+for you. We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for you and we talk for
+you. All the sweet, warm little women there are! And then you go away
+from us! There never was a woman yet who pleased and satisfied a man,
+who did not lose him. Give you everything and off you must go! Lovers,
+mothers....”
+
+It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother's troubles did not deal
+exclusively with himself.
+
+“But Amanda,” he began.
+
+“If you'd looked after her properly, it would have been right enough.
+Pip was as good as gold until she undermined him.... A woman can't wait
+about like an umbrella in a stand.... He was just a boy.... Only of
+course there she was--a novelty. It is perfectly easy to understand. She
+flattered him.... Men are such fools.”
+
+“Still--it's no good saying that now.”
+
+“But she'll spend all your money, Poff! She'll break your back with
+debts. What's to prevent her? With him living on her! For that's what it
+comes to practically.”
+
+“Well, what am I to do?”
+
+“You aren't going back without tying her up, Poff? You ought to stop
+every farthing of her money--every farthing. It's your duty.”
+
+“I can't do things like that.”
+
+“But have you no Shame? To let that sort of thing go on!”
+
+“If I don't feel the Shame of it-- And I don't.”
+
+“And that money--. I got you that money, Poff! It was my money.”
+
+Benham stared at her perplexed. “What am I to do?” he asked.
+
+“Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay her through a solicitor.
+Say that if she sees him ONCE again--”
+
+He reflected. “No,” he said at last.
+
+“Poff!” she cried, “every time I see you, you are more and more like
+your father. You're going off--just as he did. That baffled, MULISH
+look--priggish--solemn! Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor woman has to
+bring into the world. But you'll do nothing. I know you'll do nothing.
+You'll stand everything. You--you Cuckold! And she'll drive by me,
+she'll pass me in theatres with the money that ought to have been mine!
+Oh! Oh!”
+
+She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other. But she
+went on talking. Faster and faster, less and less coherently; more and
+more wildly abusive. Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham
+sighed profoundly....
+
+It brought the scene to a painful end....
+
+For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.
+
+He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in
+default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her--he
+could never define what he owed her.
+
+And yet, what on earth was one to do?
+
+And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had
+misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred
+goodwill. He went down to see him before he returned to India. But if
+there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham senior, it had been
+very carefully boarded over. The parental mind and attention were
+entirely engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD about the heuristic
+method. Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the
+thing was rankling almost unendurably. It seemed to be a relief to him
+to show his son very fully the essentially illogical position of his
+assailant. He was entirely inattentive to Benham's carefully made
+conversational opportunities. He would be silent at times while Benham
+talked and then he would break out suddenly with: “What seems to me
+so unreasonable, so ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second
+argument--if one can call it an argument--.... A man who reasons as he
+does is bound to get laughed at. If people will only see it....”
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913. Sometimes
+the two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection,
+sometimes with great bitterness. When he met White in Johannesburg
+during the strike period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in London
+and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite footing.
+It was her suggestion that they should meet.
+
+About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction. He could not
+persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his relations to
+her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at no
+precise point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ignoble
+step. Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life. Like
+all of us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life
+in a certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an
+entirely different and unexpected way.... He had been ready for noble
+deeds and villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the
+dominant fact of his personal life was a perplexing riddle. He could
+not hate and condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of
+exoneration; he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without
+immediate shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he
+could not banish her from his mind.
+
+During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his
+mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but
+often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing
+denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing
+accepted. Meanwhile he worked. His nervous irritability increased, but
+it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.
+
+Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and
+method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put
+together under his headings of the first three “Limitations.” He
+had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that
+instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which
+he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of
+Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda.
+He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown that beating in his
+brain.
+
+Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
+prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this dream
+of a larger human purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and
+define that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and
+comprehending form of all the activities of the noble life. One cannot
+be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to
+an end. To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing more
+comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous and coherent than it is
+to-day seemed to him the fundamental intention of all nobility. He
+believed more and more firmly that the impulses to make and help and
+subserve great purposes are abundantly present in the world, that they
+are inhibited by hasty thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and
+that the real ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a
+release. He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men
+dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and
+he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult
+limitation. In one place he had written it, “Prejudice or Divisions.”
+ That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in the measure of
+its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great age, the noble age,
+would begin.
+
+So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world
+about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties
+and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White
+struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of
+this search for “Prejudice.” It seemed to White to be at once the most
+magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises. It was indeed no
+less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure
+and disorder.... And it was all too manifest to White also that the last
+place in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the
+back of his own head.
+
+Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array
+of influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of
+patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence
+of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the
+purely personal dissensions between man and man. And he developed a
+metaphysical interpretation of these troubles. “No doubt,” he wrote in
+one place, “much of the evil between different kinds of men is due to
+uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to
+bad thinking.” At times he seemed on the verge of the persuasion that
+most human trouble is really due to bad metaphysics. It was, one must
+remark, an extraordinary journey he had made; he had started from
+chivalry and arrived at metaphysics; every knight he held must be a
+logician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the mind. One thinks of his
+coming to this conclusion with knit brows and balancing intentness
+above whole gulfs of bathos--very much as he had once walked the Leysin
+Bisse....
+
+“Men do not know how to think,” he insisted--getting along the
+planks; “and they will not realize that they do not know how to
+think. Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of
+misconceptions.... Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the mind,
+and muddled thinking as ignoble as dirty conduct.... Infinitely more
+disastrous.”
+
+And again he wrote: “Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too
+eager to get into action. There is our deepest trouble. He takes
+conclusions ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry. Life is so short
+that he thinks it better to err than wait. He has no patience, no faith
+in anything but himself. He thinks he is a being when in reality he is
+only a link in a being, and so he is more anxious to be complete than
+right. The last devotion of which he is capable is that devotion of
+the mind which suffers partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive
+thought. He scamps his thought and finishes his performance, and before
+he is dead it is already being abandoned and begun all over again by
+some one else in the same egotistical haste....”
+
+It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these words
+should have been written by a man who walked the plank to fresh ideas
+with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward,
+and who acted time after time with an altogether disastrous hastiness.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the
+cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice
+and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research
+Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays
+and abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale,
+than you can profess religion and refuse to think about God. In the past
+it was possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to
+unexamined things. One could be loyal to unexamined things because they
+were unchallenged things. But now everything is challenged. By the
+time of his second visit to Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious
+and deliberate aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal
+responsibility had already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he
+was, as it were, an uncrowned king in the world. To be noble is to
+be aristocratic, that is to say, a ruler. Thence it follows that
+aristocracy is multiple kingship, and to be an aristocrat is to partake
+both of the nature of philosopher and king....
+
+Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no
+means necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in quality,
+petty in spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and limited,
+fall far short of kingship. Nevertheless, there IS nobility, there
+IS kingship, or this earth is a dustbin and mankind but a kind of
+skin-disease upon a planet. From that it is an easy step to this idea,
+the idea whose first expression had already so touched the imagination
+of Amanda, of a sort of diffused and voluntary kingship scattered
+throughout mankind. The aristocrats are not at the high table, the
+kings are not enthroned, those who are enthroned are but pretenders and
+SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar; the real king and ruler is every man who
+sets aside the naive passions and self-interest of the common life for
+the rule and service of the world.
+
+This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary writing. It
+is one of those ideas that seem to appear simultaneously at many points
+in the world, and it is impossible to say now how far Benham was
+an originator of this idea, and how far he simply resonated to its
+expression by others. It was far more likely that Prothero, getting it
+heaven knows where, had spluttered it out and forgotten it, leaving it
+to germinate in the mind of his friend....
+
+This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to
+Benham as his life went on. When Benham walked the Bisse he was just
+a youngster resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled in the
+jungle by night he was there for all mankind. With every year he became
+more and more definitely to himself a consecrated man as kings are
+consecrated. Only that he was self-consecrated, and anointed only in
+his heart. At last he was, so to speak, Haroun al Raschid again, going
+unsuspected about the world, because the palace of his security would
+not tell him the secrets of men's disorders. He was no longer a creature
+of circumstances, he was kingly, unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the
+Danes. In the great later accumulations of his Research the personal
+matter, the introspection, the intimate discussion of motive, becomes
+less and less. He forgets himself in the exaltation of kingliness. He
+worries less and less over the particular rightness of his
+definite acts. In these later papers White found Benham abstracted,
+self-forgetful, trying to find out with an ever increased
+self-detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why there are
+massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why we let famine, disease
+and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast multitudes in the
+midst of possible plenty. And when he found out and as far as he found
+out, he meant quite simply and earnestly to apply his knowledge....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The intellectualism of Benham intensified to the end. His definition of
+Prejudice impressed White as being the most bloodless and philosophical
+formula that ever dominated the mind of a man.
+
+“Prejudice,” Benham had written, “is that common incapacity of the human
+mind to understand that a difference in any respect is not a difference
+in all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by an instinctive
+hostility to what is unlike ourselves. We exaggerate classification and
+then charge it with mischievous emotion by referring it to ourselves.”
+ And under this comprehensive formula he proceeded to study and attack
+Family Prejudice, National Prejudice, Race Prejudice, War, Class
+Prejudice, Professional Prejudice, Sex Prejudice, in the most
+industrious and elaborate manner. Whether one regards one's self or
+others he held that these prejudices are evil things. “From the point
+of view of human welfare they break men up into wars and conflicts,
+make them an easy prey to those who trade upon suspicion and hostility,
+prevent sane collective co-operations, cripple and embitter life. From
+the point of view of personal aristocracy they make men vulgar, violent,
+unjust and futile. All the conscious life of the aristocrat must be a
+constant struggle against false generalizations; it is as much his duty
+to free himself from that as from fear, indulgence, and jealousy; it is
+a larger and more elaborate task, but it is none the less cardinal and
+essential. Indeed it is more cardinal and essential. The true knight has
+to be not only no coward, no self-pamperer, no egotist. He has to be a
+philosopher. He has to be no hasty or foolish thinker. His judgment no
+more than his courage is to be taken by surprise.
+
+“To subdue fear, desire and jealousy, is the aristocrat's personal
+affair, it is his ritual and discipline, like a knight watching his
+arms; but the destruction of division and prejudice and all their
+forms and establishments, is his real task, that is the common work of
+knighthood. It is a task to be done in a thousand ways; one man working
+by persuasion, another by example, this one overthrowing some crippling
+restraint upon the freedom of speech and the spread of knowledge,
+and that preparing himself for a war that will shatter a tyrannous
+presumption. Most imaginative literature, all scientific investigation,
+all sound criticism, all good building, all good manufacture, all sound
+politics, every honesty and every reasoned kindliness contribute to this
+release of men from the heat and confusions of our present world.”
+
+It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part of
+his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he was not
+making his own personal research alone, but, side by side with a vast,
+masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of others; that this great
+idea of his was under kindred forms the great idea of thousands, that
+it was breaking as the dawn breaks, simultaneously to great numbers of
+people, and that the time was not far off when the new aristocracy, the
+disguised rulers of the world, would begin to realize their common
+bent and effort. Into these latter papers there creeps more and more
+frequently a new phraseology, such expressions as the “Invisible King”
+ and the “Spirit of Kingship,” so that as Benham became personally more
+and more solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.
+
+Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of mankind.
+He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices worked, to get
+at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of prejudice, and to
+devise means for its treatment, destruction or neutralization. He had no
+great faith in the power of pure reasonableness; his psychological ideas
+were modern, and he had grasped the fact that the power of most of the
+great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual
+level. Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
+with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to
+discover their sub-rational springs.
+
+A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven
+Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience
+decided could not possibly “make a book,” consisted of notes and
+discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this
+or that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary
+trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in
+Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom he had his first really
+illuminating encounter with race and culture prejudice. His examination
+of the social and political condition of Russia seems to have left him
+much more hopeful than was the common feeling of liberal-minded people
+during the years of depression that followed the revolution of 1906, and
+it was upon the race question that his attention concentrated.
+
+The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India. Here in an entirely
+different environment was another discord of race and culture, and
+he found in his study of it much that illuminated and corrected his
+impressions of the Russian issue. A whole drawer was devoted to a
+comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into human dissensions
+in lower Bengal. Here there were not only race but culture conflicts,
+and he could work particularly upon the differences between men of the
+same race who were Hindus, Christians and Mahometans respectively.
+He could compare the Bengali Mahometan not only with the Bengali
+Brahminist, but also with the Mahometan from the north-west. “If one
+could scrape off all the creed and training, would one find much the
+same thing at the bottom, or something fundamentally so different that
+no close homogeneous social life and not even perhaps a life of just
+compromise is possible between the different races of mankind?”
+
+His answer to that was a confident one. “There are no such natural and
+unalterable differences in character and quality between any two sorts
+of men whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly co-operation in
+the world impossible,” he wrote.
+
+But he was not satisfied with his observations in India. He found the
+prevalence of caste ideas antipathetic and complicating. He went on
+after his last parting from Amanda into China, it was the first of
+several visits to China, and thence he crossed to America. White found a
+number of American press-cuttings of a vehemently anti-Japanese quality
+still awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it was clear to him that
+Benham had given a considerable amount of attention to the development
+of the “white” and “yellow” race hostility on the Pacific slope; but his
+chief interest at that time had been the negro. He went to Washington
+and thence south; he visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at
+a tangent to Hayti. He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid
+book, WHERE BLACK RULES WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able
+to visit that wonderful monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La
+Ferriere, the citadel built a century ago by the “Black Napoleon,” the
+Emperor Christophe. He went with a young American demonstrator from
+Harvard.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It was a memorable excursion. They rode from Cap Haytien for a day's
+journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of luxurious
+vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of unbridled jungle
+with populous country. They passed countless villages of thatched huts
+alive with curiosity and swarming with naked black children, and yet all
+the time they seemed to be in a wilderness. They forded rivers, they had
+at times to force themselves through thickets, once or twice they
+lost their way, and always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great
+mountain peak with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the
+background until it dominated the landscape. Long after dark they
+blundered upon rather than came to the village at its foot where they
+were to pass the night. They were interrogated under a flaring torch by
+peering ragged black soldiers, and passed through a firelit crowd into
+the presence of the local commandant to dispute volubly about their
+right to go further. They might have been in some remote corner of
+Nigeria. Their papers, laboriously got in order, were vitiated by the
+fact, which only became apparent by degrees, that the commandant could
+not read. They carried their point with difficulty.
+
+But they carried their point, and, watched and guarded by a hungry
+half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of
+trousers, they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of
+imperialism that humanity has ever made. The roads and parks and
+prospects constructed by this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long
+since disappeared, and the three men clambered for hours up ravines and
+precipitous jungle tracks, occasionally crossing the winding traces of
+a choked and ruined road that had once been the lordly approach to his
+fastness. Below they passed an abandoned palace of vast extent, a palace
+with great terraces and the still traceable outline of gardens, though
+there were green things pushing between the terrace steps, and trees
+thrust out of the empty windows. Here from a belvedere of which the
+skull-like vestige still remained, the negro Emperor Christophe, after
+fourteen years of absolute rule, had watched for a time the smoke of the
+burning of his cane-fields in the plain below, and then, learning that
+his bodyguard had deserted him, had gone in and blown out his brains.
+
+He had christened the place after the best of examples, “Sans Souci.”
+
+But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he never
+used. The defection of his guards made him abandon that. To build it,
+they say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives. He had the true Imperial
+lavishness. So high it was, so lost in a wilderness of trees and bush,
+looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch
+and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky--for even the
+guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in
+its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside its walls--and at the
+same time so huge and grandiose--there were walls thirty feet thick,
+galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls,
+king's apartments and queen's apartments, towering battlements and
+great arched doorways--that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and
+passing of that miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing
+of multitudes before one man and the transitoriness of such glories,
+more completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world
+before. Beneath the battlements--they are choked above with jungle grass
+and tamarinds and many flowery weeds--the precipice fell away a sheer
+two thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain populous and
+diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an amethystine wall.
+Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling his victims, and below
+this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons where men, broken and torn,
+thrust in at the neck-like hole above, starved and died: it was his
+headquarters here, here he had his torture chambers and the means for
+nameless cruelties....
+
+“Not a hundred years ago,” said Benham's companion, and told the story
+of the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.
+
+“Leap,” said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one
+questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last
+gesture of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed, and
+with a convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down through the
+shimmering air.
+
+Came presently the little faint sound of his fall.
+
+The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this
+projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and
+presently struggled and found itself still a living man. It could
+scramble down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for mercy.
+An hour and it stood before Christophe again, with an arm broken and
+bloody and a face torn, a battered thing now but with a faint flavour of
+pride in its bearing. “Your bidding has been done, Sire,” it said.
+
+“So,” said the Emperor, unappeased. “And you live? Well-- Leap
+again....”
+
+And then came other stories. The young man told them as he had heard
+them, stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men standing along
+the walls of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by one as the feast
+went on, of exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and his one note of
+wonder, his refrain was, “HERE! Not a hundred years ago.... It makes one
+almost believe that somewhere things of this sort are being done now.”
+
+They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins. The
+lizards which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the
+sunshine. The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his black
+fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a search for
+some saleable memento....
+
+Benham sat musing in silence. The thought of deliberate cruelty was
+always an actual physical distress to him. He sat bathed in the dreamy
+afternoon sunlight and struggled against the pictures that crowded
+into his mind, pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-driven men
+toiling in agony, and of the shame of extorted obedience and of cringing
+and crawling black figures, and the defiance of righteous hate beaten
+down under blow and anguish. He saw eyes alight with terror and lips
+rolled back in agony, he saw weary hopeless flight before striding proud
+destruction, he saw the poor trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in
+his soul....
+
+He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride, and
+then the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes Christophes
+but humility.
+
+There is in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his
+superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking
+individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience. Every natural
+sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a
+definite direction for his own partial life. At the bottom of his heart
+he feels, even if he does not know it definitely, that his life is
+partial. He is driven to join himself on. He obeys decision and the
+appearance of strength as a horse obeys its rider's voice. One thinks
+of the pride, the uncontrolled frantic will of this black ape of all
+Emperors, and one forgets the universal docility that made him possible.
+Usurpation is a crime to which men are tempted by human dirigibility.
+It is the orderly peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much
+restraint above as stiff insubordination below that has to be taught to
+men. There are kings and tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of
+the unkingliness of men.
+
+And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, Benham cast off from
+his mind his last tolerance for earthly kings and existing States, and
+expounded to another human being for the first time this long-cherished
+doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is the lord of human destiny,
+the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the sceptre and rule the
+earth.... To the young American's naive American response to any simply
+felt emotion, he seemed with his white earnestness and his glowing eyes
+a veritable prophet....
+
+“This is the root idea of aristocracy,” said Benham.
+
+“I have never heard the underlying spirit of democracy, the real true
+Thing in democracy, so thoroughly expressed,” said the young American.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Benham's notes on race and racial cultures gave White tantalizing
+glimpses of a number of picturesque experiences. The adventure in Kieff
+had first roused Benham to the reality of racial quality. He was caught
+in the wheels of a pogrom.
+
+“Before that time I had been disposed to minimize and deny race. I still
+think it need not prevent men from the completest social co-operation,
+but I see now better than I did how difficult it is for any man to purge
+from his mind the idea that he is not primarily a Jew, a Teuton, or a
+Kelt, but a man. You can persuade any one in five minutes that he or she
+belongs to some special and blessed and privileged sort of human
+being; it takes a lifetime to destroy that persuasion. There are these
+confounded differences of colour, of eye and brow, of nose or hair,
+small differences in themselves except that they give a foothold and
+foundation for tremendous fortifications of prejudice and tradition, in
+which hostilities and hatreds may gather. When I think of a Jew's nose,
+a Chinaman's eyes or a negro's colour I am reminded of that fatal little
+pit which nature has left in the vermiform appendix, a thing no use in
+itself and of no significance, but a gathering-place for mischief. The
+extremest case of race-feeling is the Jewish case, and even here, I am
+convinced, it is the Bible and the Talmud and the exertions of those
+inevitable professional champions who live upon racial feeling, far more
+than their common distinction of blood, which holds this people together
+banded against mankind.”
+
+Between the lines of such general propositions as this White read little
+scraps of intimation that linked with the things Benham let fall in
+Johannesburg to reconstruct the Kieff adventure.
+
+Benham had been visiting a friend in the country on the further side
+of the Dnieper. As they drove back along dusty stretches of road amidst
+fields of corn and sunflower and through bright little villages, they
+saw against the evening blue under the full moon a smoky red glare
+rising from amidst the white houses and dark trees of the town. “The
+pogrom's begun,” said Benham's friend, and was surprised when Benham
+wanted to end a pleasant day by going to see what happens after the
+beginning of a pogrom.
+
+He was to have several surprises before at last he left Benham in
+disgust and went home by himself.
+
+For Benham, with that hastiness that so flouted his exalted theories,
+passed rapidly from an attitude of impartial enquiry to active
+intervention. The two men left their carriage and plunged into
+the network of unlovely dark streets in which the Jews and traders
+harboured.... Benham's first intervention was on behalf of a crouching
+and yelping bundle of humanity that was being dragged about and kicked
+at a street corner. The bundle resolved itself into a filthy little old
+man, and made off with extraordinary rapidity, while Benham remonstrated
+with the kickers. Benham's tallness, his very Gentile face, his good
+clothes, and an air of tense authority about him had its effect, and
+the kickers shuffled off with remarks that were partly apologies. But
+Benham's friend revolted. This was no business of theirs.
+
+Benham went on unaccompanied towards the glare of the burning houses.
+
+For a time he watched. Black figures moved between him and the glare,
+and he tried to find out the exact nature of the conflict by enquiries
+in clumsy Russian. He was told that the Jews had insulted a religious
+procession, that a Jew had spat at an ikon, that the shop of a cheating
+Jew trader had been set on fire, and that the blaze had spread to the
+adjacent group of houses. He gathered that the Jews were running out of
+the burning block on the other side “like rats.” The crowd was mostly
+composed of town roughs with a sprinkling of peasants. They were
+mischievous but undecided. Among them were a number of soldiers, and
+he was surprised to see a policemen, brightly lit from head to foot,
+watching the looting of a shop that was still untouched by the flames.
+
+He held back some men who had discovered a couple of women's figures
+slinking along in the shadow beneath a wall. Behind his remonstrances
+the Jewesses escaped. His anger against disorder was growing upon
+him....
+
+Late that night Benham found himself the leading figure amidst a party
+of Jews who had made a counter attack upon a gang of roughs in a court
+that had become the refuge of a crowd of fugitives. Some of the young
+Jewish men had already been making a fight, rather a poor and hopeless
+fight, from the windows of the house near the entrance of the court, but
+it is doubtful if they would have made an effective resistance if it
+had not been for this tall excited stranger who was suddenly shouting
+directions to them in sympathetically murdered Russian. It was not that
+he brought powerful blows or subtle strategy to their assistance, but
+that he put heart into them and perplexity into his adversaries because
+he was so manifestly non-partizan. Nobody could ever have mistaken
+Benham for a Jew. When at last towards dawn a not too zealous governor
+called out the troops and began to clear the streets of rioters, Benham
+and a band of Jews were still keeping the gateway of that court behind a
+hasty but adequate barricade of furniture and handbarrows.
+
+The ghetto could not understand him, nobody could understand him, but it
+was clear a rare and precious visitor had come to their rescue, and he
+was implored by a number of elderly, dirty, but very intelligent-looking
+old men to stay with them and preserve them until their safety was
+assured.
+
+They could not understand him, but they did their utmost to entertain
+him and assure him of their gratitude. They seemed to consider him as
+a representative of the British Government, and foreign intervention on
+their behalf is one of those unfortunate fixed ideas that no persecuted
+Jews seem able to abandon.
+
+Benham found himself, refreshed and tended, sitting beside a wood fire
+in an inner chamber richly flavoured by humanity and listening to a
+discourse in evil but understandable German. It was a discourse upon the
+wrongs and the greatness of the Jewish people--and it was delivered by
+a compact middle-aged man with a big black beard and long-lashed but
+animated eyes. Beside him a very old man dozed and nodded approval. A
+number of other men crowded the apartment, including several who had
+helped to hold off the rioters from the court. Some could follow the
+talk and ever again endorsed the speaker in Yiddish or Russian; others
+listened with tantalized expressions, their brows knit, their lips
+moving.
+
+It was a discourse Benham had provoked. For now he was at the very heart
+of the Jewish question, and he could get some light upon the mystery
+of this great hatred at first hand. He did not want to hear tales of
+outrages, of such things he knew, but he wanted to understand what was
+the irritation that caused these things.
+
+So he listened. The Jew dilated at first on the harmlessness and
+usefulness of the Jews.
+
+“But do you never take a certain advantage?” Benham threw out.
+
+“The Jews are cleverer than the Russians. Must we suffer for that?”
+
+The spokesman went on to the more positive virtues of his race. Benham
+suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling of the Gentile who finds a bill
+being made against him. Did the world owe Israel nothing for Philo,
+Aron ben Asher, Solomon Gabriol, Halevy, Mendelssohn, Heine, Meyerbeer,
+Rubinstein, Joachim, Zangwill? Does Britain owe nothing to Lord
+Beaconsfield, Montefiore or the Rothschilds? Can France repudiate her
+debt to Fould, Gaudahaux, Oppert, or Germany to Furst, Steinschneider,
+Herxheimer, Lasker, Auerbach, Traube and Lazarus and Benfey?...
+
+Benham admitted under the pressure of urgent tones and gestures that
+these names did undoubtedly include the cream of humanity, but was it
+not true that the Jews did press a little financially upon the inferior
+peoples whose lands they honoured in their exile?
+
+The man with the black beard took up the challenge bravely.
+
+“They are merciful creditors,” he said. “And it is their genius to
+possess and control. What better stewards could you find for the wealth
+of nations than the Jews? And for the honours? That always had been the
+role of the Jews--stewardship. Since the days of Joseph in Egypt....”
+
+Then in a lower voice he went on to speak of the deficiencies of the
+Gentile population. He wished to be just and generous but the truth was
+the truth. The Christian Russians loved drink and laziness; they had no
+sense of property; were it not for unjust laws even now the Jews would
+possess all the land of South Russia....
+
+Benham listened with a kind of fascination. “But,” he said.
+
+It was so. And with a confidence that aroused a protest or so from the
+onlookers, the Jewish apologist suddenly rose up, opened a safe close
+beside the fire and produced an armful of documents.
+
+“Look!” he said, “all over South Russia there are these!”
+
+Benham was a little slow to understand, until half a dozen of these
+papers had been thrust into his hand. Eager fingers pointed, and several
+voices spoke. These things were illegalities that might some day be
+legal; there were the records of loans and hidden transactions that
+might at any time put all the surrounding soil into the hands of the
+Jew. All South Russia was mortgaged....
+
+“But is it so?” asked Benham, and for a time ceased to listen and stared
+into the fire.
+
+Then he held up the papers in his hand to secure silence and, feeling
+his way in unaccustomed German, began to speak and continued to speak in
+spite of a constant insurgent undertone of interruption from the Jewish
+spokesman.
+
+All men, Benham said, were brothers. Did they not remember Nathan the
+Wise?
+
+“I did not claim him,” said the spokesman, misunderstanding. “He is a
+character in fiction.”
+
+But all men are brothers, Benham maintained. They had to be merciful to
+one another and give their gifts freely to one another. Also they had
+to consider each other's weaknesses. The Jews were probably justified
+in securing and administering the property of every community into which
+they came, they were no doubt right in claiming to be best fitted for
+that task, but also they had to consider, perhaps more than they did,
+the feelings and vanities of the host population into which they brought
+these beneficent activities. What was said of the ignorance, incapacity
+and vice of the Roumanians and Russians was very generally believed and
+accepted, but it did not alter the fact that the peasant, for all his
+incapacity, did like to imagine he owned his own patch and hovel and did
+have a curious irrational hatred of debt....
+
+The faces about Benham looked perplexed.
+
+“THIS,” said Benham, tapping the papers in his hand. “They will not
+understand the ultimate benefit of it. It will be a source of anger
+and fresh hostility. It does not follow because your race has supreme
+financial genius that you must always follow its dictates to the
+exclusion of other considerations....”
+
+The perplexity increased.
+
+Benham felt he must be more general. He went on to emphasize the
+brotherhood of man, the right to equal opportunity, equal privilege,
+freedom to develop their idiosyncrasies as far as possible, unhindered
+by the idiosyncrasies of others. He could feel the sympathy and
+understanding of his hearers returning. “You see,” said Benham, “you
+must have generosity. You must forget ancient scores. Do you not see the
+world must make a fresh beginning?”
+
+He was entirely convinced he had them with him. The heads nodded assent,
+the bright eyes and lips followed the slow disentanglement of his bad
+German.
+
+“Free yourselves and the world,” he said.
+
+Applause.
+
+“And so,” he said breaking unconsciously into English, “let us begin by
+burning these BEASTLY mortgages!”
+
+And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the
+fire. The assenting faces became masks of horror. A score of hands
+clutched at those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger filled
+the room. Some one caught at his throat from behind. “Don't kill him!”
+ cried some one. “He fought for us!”
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled
+and battered condition to his hotel. He found his friend in anxious
+consultation with the hotel proprietor.
+
+“We were afraid that something had happened to you,” said his friend.
+
+“I got a little involved,” said Benham.
+
+“Hasn't some one clawed your cheek?”
+
+“Very probably,” said Benham.
+
+“And torn your coat? And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?”
+
+“It was a complicated misunderstanding,” said Benham. “Oh! pardon! I'm
+rather badly bruised upon that arm you're holding.”
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.
+
+“I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my point of
+view,” he said....
+
+“I'm not sure if they quite followed my German....
+
+“It's odd, too, that I remember saying, 'Let's burn these mortgages,'
+and at the time I'm almost sure I didn't know the German for
+mortgage....”
+
+It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to
+grasp the full intention behind Benham's proceedings. His aristocratic
+impulses were apt to run away with his conceptions of brotherhood, and
+time after time it was only too manifest to White that Benham's
+pallid flash of anger had astonished the subjects of his disinterested
+observations extremely. His explorations in Hayti had been terminated
+abruptly by an affair with a native policeman that had necessitated the
+intervention of the British Consul. It was begun with that suddenness
+that was too often characteristic of Benham, by his hitting the
+policeman. It was in the main street of Cap Haytien, and the policeman
+had just clubbed an unfortunate youth over the head with the heavily
+loaded wooden club which is the normal instrument of Haytien discipline.
+His blow was a repartee, part of a triangular altercation in which a
+large, voluble, mahogany-coloured lady whose head was tied up in a
+blue handkerchief played a conspicuous part, but it seemed to Benham an
+entirely unjustifiable blow.
+
+He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had been
+gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince to carry
+him away. He advanced with the kind of shout one would hurl at a dog,
+and smote the policeman to the earth with the stout stick that the
+peculiar social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him to carry. By the
+local standard his blow was probably a trivial one, but the moral effect
+of his indignant pallor and a sort of rearing tallness about him
+on these occasions was always very considerable. Unhappily these
+characteristics could have no effect on a second negro policeman who was
+approaching the affray from behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on
+the shoulder that was meant for the head, and with the assistance of his
+colleague overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.
+
+The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to the
+lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer's superior
+knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his British
+citizenship.
+
+The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German gunboat
+was still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed it that in
+spite of his blank refusal to compensate the man he had knocked over, he
+was after two days of anger, two days of extreme insanitary experience,
+and much meditation upon his unphilosophical hastiness, released.
+
+Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified his
+enquiries into Indian conditions. They too turned for the most part
+on his facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt desire for
+human brotherhood. At last indeed came an affair that refused ultimately
+to remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil that invoked newspaper
+articles and heated controversies.
+
+The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
+attraction and irritation. He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
+intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
+infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India
+into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to the
+other. “I came to see India,” he wrote, “and there is no India. There is
+a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin in the air,
+quietly scorning everybody else.”
+
+His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste began
+with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had turned an
+Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and culminated in
+a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness at Benares, who had
+thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham's shadow
+had fallen upon it.
+
+“You unendurable snob!” said Benham, and then lapsing into the forceful
+and inadvisable: “By Heaven, you SHALL eat it!...”
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Benham's detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep in
+his character as to seem almost instinctive. But he had too a very clear
+reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in human continuity
+in his sense of the gathering dangers they now involve. They had always,
+he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and the destruction
+of human dignity, but the new conditions of life that have been brought
+about by modern science were making them far more dangerous than they
+had ever been before. He believed that the evil and horror of war was
+becoming more and more tremendous with every decade, and that the free
+play of national prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness
+that seems to be inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate
+catastrophe, unless a real international aristocracy could be brought
+into being to prevent it.
+
+In the drawer full of papers labelled “Politics,” White found a paper
+called “The Metal Beast.” It showed that for a time Benham had been
+greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were in those days
+piling up in every country in Europe. He had gone to Essen, and at Essen
+he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great guns that
+were presently to smash the effete British fleet and open the Imperial
+way to London.
+
+“I could not sleep,” he wrote, “on account of this man and his talk and
+the streak of hatred in his talk. He distressed me not because he seemed
+exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary. I realized that he was more
+human than I was, and that only killing and killing could come out of
+such humanity. I thought of the great ugly guns I had seen, and of the
+still greater guns he had talked about, and how gloatingly he thought
+of the destruction they could do. I felt as I used to feel about that
+infernal stallion that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a
+despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in life. And this creature
+who had so disturbed me was only a beastly snuffy little man in an
+ill-fitting frock-coat, who laid his knife and fork by their tips on the
+edge of his plate, and picked his teeth with gusto and breathed into
+my face as he talked to me. The commonest of representative men. I went
+about that Westphalian country after that, with the conviction that
+headless, soulless, blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all
+about me. I felt that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest
+of black dragons. They were crouching here and away there in France and
+England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed
+up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks are
+hooded.... And I had never thought very much about them before, and
+there they were, waiting until some human fool like that frock-coated
+thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million, saw fit
+to call them out to action. Just out of hatred and nationalism and
+faction....”
+
+Then came a queer fancy.
+
+“Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see it
+more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for the
+happiness of life. It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous
+plot of the rebel metals against sensation. That is why in particular
+half-living people seem to love these things. La Ferriere was a fastness
+of the kind of tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny
+of the strong man over men. Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of
+the strong machine....
+
+“Science is either slave or master. These people--I mean the German
+people and militarist people generally--have no real mastery over the
+scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride. The monster
+of steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive. It
+has persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they must follow the
+logic of its path. Whither?... Only kingship will ever master that beast
+of steel which has got loose into the world. Nothing but the sense of
+unconquerable kingship in us all will ever dare withstand it.... Men
+must be kingly aristocrats--it isn't MAY be now, it is MUST be--or,
+these confederated metals, these things of chemistry and metallurgy,
+these explosives and mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of
+our race into mere red-streaked froth and filth....”
+
+Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast's release. Would
+it ever be given blood?
+
+“Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great war
+that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is with
+a note of incredulity that one tells oneself, 'After all this war may
+happen. But can it happen?'”
+
+He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war would
+ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident to White
+that he wanted very much to persuade himself against that idea. It was
+too disagreeable for him to think it probable. The paper was dated 1910.
+It was in October, 1914, that White, who was still working upon the
+laborious uncertain account of Benham's life and thought he has recently
+published, read what Benham had written. Benham concluded that the
+common-sense of the world would hold up this danger until reason could
+get “to the head of things.”
+
+“There are already mighty forces in Germany,” Benham wrote, “that will
+struggle very powerfully to avoid a war. And these forces increase.
+Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama and the
+display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble people.... I
+have talked with Germans of the better kind.... You cannot have a whole
+nation of Christophes.... There also the true knighthood discovers
+itself.... I do not believe this war will overtake us.”
+
+“WELL!” said White.
+
+“I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better,” the notes
+went on.
+
+But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve. Other
+things were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was too
+late for them....
+
+“It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over
+Europe, because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the blood of
+a people, because a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled.... Does
+no one see what that metallic beast will do if they once let it loose?
+It will trample cities; it will devour nations....”
+
+White read this on the 9th of October, 1914. One crumpled evening
+paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: “Rain of Incendiary
+Shells. Antwerp Ablaze.” Another declared untruthfully but impressively:
+“Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City.”
+
+He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and
+turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no
+data at all--as every one did at that time--before he was able to go on
+with Benham's manuscripts.
+
+These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like
+finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between the
+pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a
+heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill....
+
+“How can we ever begin over again?” said White, and sat for a long time
+staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too
+that men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to
+succeed them....
+
+“We have to begin over again,” said White at last, and took up Benham's
+papers where he had laid them down....
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth Limitation
+was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position. This
+section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the
+psychology of economic organization....
+
+It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important part
+played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of
+human affairs. This was a very natural result of his peculiar social
+circumstances. Most people born to wealth and ease take the established
+industrial system as the natural method in human affairs; it is only
+very reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and disinterestedness
+that they can be brought to realize that it is natural only in the sense
+that it has grown up and come about, and necessary only because nobody
+is strong and clever enough to rearrange it. Their experience of it is
+a satisfactory experience. On the other hand, the better off one is, the
+wider is one's outlook and the more alert one is to see the risks and
+dangers of international dissensions. Travel and talk to foreigners open
+one's eyes to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become
+conceivable. It is in the nature of things that socialists and labour
+parties should minimize international obligations and necessities, and
+equally so that autocracies and aristocracies and plutocracies should be
+negligent of and impatient about social reform.
+
+But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker and
+director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful humanity and
+enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned opportunity. It is a far
+profounder and subtler conflict than any other in human affairs. “I can
+foresee a time,” he wrote, “when the greater national and racial hatreds
+may all be so weakened as to be no longer a considerable source of human
+limitation and misery, when the suspicions of complexion and language
+and social habit are allayed, and when the element of hatred and
+aggression may be clean washed out of most religious cults, but I do not
+begin to imagine a time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there
+will not be great friction between those who employ, those who direct
+collective action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in
+industrialism. This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due
+very largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort of
+organization. Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass and
+self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so deeply
+seated, so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be cheerfully
+obedient and modestly directive in war time, there is no reason why
+ultimately they should not be so in the business of peace. But I do not
+understand the elements of the methods by which this state of affairs
+can be brought about.
+
+“If I were to confess this much to an intelligent working man I know
+that at once he would answer 'Socialism,' but Socialism is no more a
+solution of this problem than eating is a solution when one is lost in
+the wilderness and hungry. Of course everybody with any intelligence
+wants Socialism, everybody, that is to say, wants to see all human
+efforts directed to the common good and a common end, but brought face
+to face with practical problems Socialism betrays a vast insufficiency
+of practical suggestions. I do not say that Socialism would not work,
+but I do say that so far Socialists have failed to convince me that
+they could work it. The substitution of a stupid official for a greedy
+proprietor may mean a vanished dividend, a limited output and no
+other human advantage whatever. Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent
+gesture, inspiring, encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not very
+helpful, towards the vast problem of moral and material adjustment
+before the race. That problem is incurably miscellaneous and intricate,
+and only by great multitudes of generous workers, one working at this
+point and one at that, secretly devoted knights of humanity, hidden
+and dispersed kings, unaware of one another, doubting each his right
+to count himself among those who do these kingly services, is this
+elaborate rightening of work and guidance to be done.”
+
+So from these most fundamental social difficulties he came back to his
+panacea. All paths and all enquiries led him back to his conception of
+aristocracy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted, self-examining yet
+secret, making no personal nor class pretences, as the supreme need not
+only of the individual but the world.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal which had brought the two
+schoolfellows together again. White had been on his way to Zimbabwe.
+An emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had driven him to seek
+consolations in strange scenery and mysterious desolations. It was as if
+Zimbabwe called to him. Benham had come to South Africa to see into the
+question of Indian immigration, and he was now on his way to meet Amanda
+in London. Neither man had given much heed to the gathering social
+conflict on the Rand until the storm burst about them. There had been
+a few paragraphs in the papers about a dispute upon a point of labour
+etiquette, a question of the recognition of Trade Union officials, a
+thing that impressed them both as technical, and then suddenly a long
+incubated quarrel flared out in rioting and violence, the burning of
+houses and furniture, attacks on mines, attempts to dynamite trains.
+White stayed in Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded up
+country by the railway strike that was among the possibilities of
+the situation. Benham stayed because he was going to London very
+reluctantly, and he was glad of this justification for a few days'
+delay. The two men found themselves occupying adjacent tables in the
+Sherborough Hotel, and White was the first to recognize the other. They
+came together with a warmth and readiness of intimacy that neither would
+have displayed in London.
+
+White had not seen Benham since the social days of Amanda at Lancaster
+Gate, and he was astonished at the change a few years had made in him.
+The peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair had become more
+marked, his skin was deader, his features seemed more prominent and his
+expression intenser. His eyes were very bright and more sunken under his
+brows. He had suffered from yellow fever in the West Indies, and these
+it seemed were the marks left by that illness. And he was much more
+detached from the people about him; less attentive to the small
+incidents of life, more occupied with inner things. He greeted White
+with a confidence that White was one day to remember as pathetic.
+
+“It is good to meet an old friend,” Benham said. “I have lost friends.
+And I do not make fresh ones. I go about too much by myself, and I do
+not follow the same tracks that other people are following....”
+
+What track was he following? It was now that White first heard of the
+Research Magnificent. He wanted to know what Benham was doing, and
+Benham after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his interest
+in insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions. “It is, of
+course, a part of something else,” he amplified. He was writing a book,
+“an enormous sort of book.” He laughed with a touch of shyness. It
+was about “everything,” about how to live and how not to live. And
+“aristocracy, and all sorts of things.” White was always curious about
+other people's books. Benham became earnest and more explicit under
+encouragement, and to talk about his book was soon to talk about
+himself. In various ways, intentionally and inadvertently, he told White
+much. These chance encounters, these intimacies of the train and hotel,
+will lead men at times to a stark frankness of statement they would
+never permit themselves with habitual friends.
+
+About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little,
+considering how insistent it was becoming. But the wide propositions
+of the Research Magnificent, with its large indifference to immediate
+occurrences, its vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted
+very sharply in White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and
+resentment of the events about them. For him the thought of that first
+discussion of this vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was
+flowering, and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a
+fringe of vivid little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying
+on bicycles and afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring
+centres of disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, of the
+muffled galloping of troops through the broad dusty street in the night,
+of groups of men standing and watching down straight broad roads, roads
+that ended in groups of chimneys and squat buildings of corrugated iron.
+And once there was a marching body of white men in the foreground and a
+complicated wire fence, and a clustering mass of Kaffirs watching them
+over this fence and talking eagerly amongst themselves.
+
+“All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,”
+ said Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation....
+
+But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt that
+it was more than that. Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that
+eventful background while Benham talked to him.
+
+When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the
+background the greater share of his attention....
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that the
+full values came to very many things that Benham said during these last
+conversations. The papers fitted in with his memories of their long
+talks like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk had repeated
+the private writings in which he had first digested his ideas that it
+was presently almost impossible to disentangle what had been said and
+understood at Johannesburg from the fuller statement of those patched
+and corrected manuscripts. The two things merged in White's mind as he
+read. The written text took upon itself a resonance of Benham's
+voice; it eked out the hints and broken sentences of his remembered
+conversation.
+
+But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their
+mere marked absence an impression on White's mind. And occasionally
+after Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an
+occasional aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men who
+restrain themselves from betraying a preoccupation. He would say nothing
+about Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant to speak of
+Prothero, and another peculiarity was that he referred perhaps half a
+dozen times or more to the idea that he was a “prig.” He seemed to be
+defending himself against some inner accusation, some unconquerable
+doubt of the entire adventure of his life. These half hints and hints by
+omission exercised the quick intuitions of White's mind very keenly, and
+he drew far closer to an understanding of Benham's reserves than Benham
+ever suspected....
+
+At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
+completely justified in his treatment of her. She had betrayed him and
+he had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control. He had no doubt
+that he had punished her very effectively, and it was only after he had
+been travelling in China with Prothero for some time and in the light
+of one or two chance phrases in her letters that he began to have doubts
+whether he ought to have punished her at all. And one night at Shanghai
+he had a dream in which she stood before him, dishevelled and tearful,
+his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was dirty
+and shameful and spoilt for ever, because he had gone away from her.
+Afterwards the dream became absurd: she showed him the black leopard's
+fur as though it was a rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the
+leopard skin that had been so bright and wonderful such a little time
+ago, and he awoke before he could answer her, and for a long time he
+was full of unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate
+unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd. She had spoilt her
+own fur. But what was more penetrating and distressing in this dream was
+not so much the case Amanda stated as the atmosphere of unconquerable
+intimacy between them, as though they still belonged to each other,
+soul to soul, as though nothing that had happened afterwards could have
+destroyed their common responsibility and the common interest of their
+first unstinted union. She was hurt, and of course he was hurt. He began
+to see that his marriage to Amanda was still infinitely more than a
+technical bond.
+
+And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether she
+realized anything of the sort. Her letters fluctuated very much in tone,
+but at times they were as detached and guarded as a schoolgirl writing
+to a cousin. Then it seemed to Benham an extraordinary fraud on her
+part that she should presume to come into his dream with an entirely
+deceptive closeness and confidence. She began to sound him in these
+latter letters upon the possibility of divorce. This, which he had been
+quite disposed to concede in London, now struck him as an outrageous
+suggestion. He wrote to ask her why, and she responded exasperatingly
+that she thought it was “better.” But, again, why better? It is
+remarkable that although his mind had habituated itself to the idea that
+Easton was her lover in London, her thought of being divorced, no doubt
+to marry again, filled him with jealous rage. She asked him to take
+the blame in the divorce proceedings. There, again, he found himself
+ungenerous. He did not want to do that. Why should he do that? As a
+matter of fact he was by no means reconciled to the price he had paid
+for his Research Magnificent; he regretted his Amanda acutely. He was
+regretting her with a regret that grew when by all the rules of life it
+ought to be diminishing.
+
+It was in consequence of that regret and his controversies with Prothero
+while they travelled together in China that his concern about what he
+called priggishness arose. It is a concern that one may suppose has a
+little afflicted every reasonably self-conscious man who has turned from
+the natural passionate personal life to religion or to public service
+or any abstract devotion. These things that are at least more extensive
+than the interests of flesh and blood have a trick of becoming
+unsubstantial, they shine gloriously and inspiringly upon the
+imagination, they capture one and isolate one and then they vanish out
+of sight. It is far easier to be entirely faithful to friend or lover
+than it is to be faithful to a cause or to one's country or to a
+religion. In the glow of one's first service that larger idea may be as
+closely spontaneous as a handclasp, but in the darkness that comes as
+the glow dies away there is a fearful sense of unreality. It was in such
+dark moments that Benham was most persecuted by his memories of Amanda
+and most distressed by this suspicion that the Research Magnificent was
+a priggishness, a pretentious logomachy. Prothero could indeed hint as
+much so skilfully that at times the dream of nobility seemed an insult
+to the sunshine, to the careless laughter of children, to the good light
+in wine and all the warm happiness of existence. And then Amanda would
+peep out of the dusk and whisper, “Of course if you could leave me--!
+Was I not LIFE? Even now if you cared to come back to me-- For I loved
+you best and loved you still, old Cheetah, long after you had left me to
+follow your dreams.... Even now I am drifting further into lies and the
+last shreds of dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful
+leopard I am now, who was once clean and bright.... You could come back,
+Cheetah, and you could save me yet. If you would love me....”
+
+In certain moods she could wring his heart by such imagined speeches,
+the very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that his ear had
+loved, and not only could she distress him, but when Benham was in this
+heartache mood, when once she had set him going, then his little mother
+also would rise against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue eyes
+bright with tears; and his frowsty father would back towards him and
+sit down complaining that he was neglected, and even little Mrs.
+Skelmersdale would reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking after
+him as he slunk away from her through Kensington Gardens; indeed every
+personal link he had ever had to life could in certain moods pull him
+back through the door of self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching
+and accusing himself of harshness and self-concentration. The very
+kittens of his childhood revived forgotten moments of long-repented
+hardness. For a year before Prothero was killed there were these
+heartaches. That tragedy gave them their crowning justification. All
+these people said in this form or that, “You owed a debt to us, you
+evaded it, you betrayed us, you owed us life out of yourself, love and
+services, and you have gone off from us all with this life that was
+ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of the world,
+and with empty phantoms of power and destiny. All this was
+intellectualization. You sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind.
+There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like you
+may lay hold upon. The rule of the world is a fortuitous result of
+incalculably multitudinous forces. But all of us you could have made
+happier. You could have spared us distresses. Prothero died because of
+you. Presently it will be the turn of your father, your mother--Amanda
+perhaps....”
+
+He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several memoranda
+about priggishness that White read and came near to understanding. In
+spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was making up his mind
+to be a prig. He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness
+against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate
+sympathy for Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and
+he made his choice. But it was a reluctant choice.
+
+One fragment began in the air. “Of course I had made myself responsible
+for her life. But it was, you see, such a confoundedly energetic life,
+as vigorous and as slippery as an eel.... Only by giving all my strength
+to her could I have held Amanda.... So what was the good of trying to
+hold Amanda?...
+
+“All one's people have this sort of claim upon one. Claims made by their
+pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and dependences.
+You've no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom when
+it means snapping and tearing the silly suffering tendrils they have
+wrapped about you. The true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp,
+enough steadiness, to be kind and right to every human being and still
+do the work that ought to be his essential life. I see that now.
+It's one of the things this last year or so of loneliness has made me
+realize; that in so far as I have set out to live the aristocratic life
+I have failed. Instead I've discovered it--and found myself out. I'm an
+overstrung man. I go harshly and continuously for one idea. I live as I
+ride. I blunder through my fences, I take off too soon. I've no natural
+ease of mind or conduct or body. I am straining to keep hold of a thing
+too big for me and do a thing beyond my ability. Only after Prothero's
+death was it possible for me to realize the prig I have always been,
+first as regards him and then as regards Amanda and my mother and every
+one. A necessary unavoidable priggishness....” I do not see how
+certain things can be done without prigs, people, that is to say, so
+concentrated and specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so
+resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced.... All things must begin
+with clumsiness, there is no assurance about pioneers....
+
+“Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain
+aristocracy.... But the very essence of aristocracy, as I conceive it,
+is that it does not explain nor talk about itself....
+
+“After all it doesn't matter what I am.... It's just a private vexation
+that I haven't got where I meant to get. That does not affect the truth
+I have to tell....
+
+“If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one must
+speak the truth. I have worked out some very considerable things in my
+research, and the time has come when I must set them out clearly and
+plainly. That is my job anyhow. My journey to London to release Amanda
+will be just the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my real
+life. It will release me from my last entanglement with the fellow
+creatures I have always failed to make happy.... It's a detail in the
+work.... And I shall go on.
+
+“But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical
+operation.
+
+“It's very like that. A surgical operation, and when it is over perhaps
+I shall think no more about it.
+
+“And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done. So
+far I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of living. I
+must begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can upon the details,
+and, presently, I shall see more clearly where other men are working to
+the same ends....”
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+Benham's expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle
+between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble life to
+the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and sympathy for
+the earthliness of that inglorious little don. Although Benham insisted
+upon the dominance of life by noble imaginations and relentless
+reasonableness, he would never altogether abandon the materialism of
+life. Prothero had once said to him, “You are the advocate of the brain
+and I of the belly. Only, only we respect each other.” And at another
+time, “You fear emotions and distrust sensations. I invite them. You do
+not drink gin because you think it would make you weep. But if I could
+not weep in any other way I would drink gin.” And it was under
+the influence of Prothero that Benham turned from the haughty
+intellectualism, the systematized superiorities and refinements, the
+caste marks and defensive dignities of India to China, that great
+teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow humanity.
+
+Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout of elevated idealism.
+It was only very slowly that he reconciled his mind to the idea of an
+entirely solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream. For some time as
+he went about the world he was trying to bring himself into relationship
+with the advanced thinkers, the liberal-minded people who seemed to
+promise at least a mental and moral co-operation. Yet it is difficult to
+see what co-operation was possible unless it was some sort of agreement
+that presently they should all shout together. And it was after a
+certain pursuit of Rabindranath Tagore, whom he met in Hampstead, that a
+horror of perfect manners and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled
+from that starry calm to the rich uncleanness of the most undignified
+fellow of Trinity. And as an advocate and exponent of the richness of
+the lower levels of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of
+the uttermost refinements of pride, Prothero went with Benham by way of
+Siberia to the Chinese scene.
+
+Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner-table in their
+choice of food and drink. Benham was always wary and Prothero always
+appreciative. It peeped out in the distribution of their time, in the
+direction of their glances. Whenever women walked about, Prothero gave
+way to a sort of ethnological excitement. “That girl--a wonderful racial
+type.” But in Moscow he was sentimental. He insisted on going again to
+the Cosmopolis Bazaar, and when he had ascertained that Anna Alexievna
+had vanished and left no trace he prowled the streets until the small
+hours.
+
+In the eastward train he talked intermittently of her. “I should have
+defied Cambridge,” he said.
+
+But at every stopping station he got out upon the platform
+ethnologically alert....
+
+Theoretically Benham was disgusted with Prothero. Really he was not
+disgusted at all. There was something about Prothero like a sparrow,
+like a starling, like a Scotch terrier.... These, too, are morally
+objectionable creatures that do not disgust....
+
+Prothero discoursed much upon the essential goodness of Russians. He
+said they were a people of genius, that they showed it in their faults
+and failures just as much as in their virtues and achievements. He
+extolled the “germinating disorder” of Moscow far above the “implacable
+discipline” of Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a base
+materialist people, could so maintain its attention upon precision and
+cleanliness. Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. “But all
+exaltation neglects,” said Prothero. “No religion has ever boasted that
+its saints were spick and span.” This controversy raged between them in
+the streets of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked their way
+through the indescribable filth of Pekin.
+
+“You say that all this is a fine disdain for material things,” said
+Benham. “But look out there!”
+
+Apt to their argument a couple of sturdy young women came shuffling
+along, cleaving the crowd in the narrow street by virtue of a single
+word and two brace of pails of human ordure.
+
+“That is not a fine disdain for material things,” said Benham. “That is
+merely individualism and unsystematic living.”
+
+“A mere phase of frankness. Only frankness is left to them now. The
+Manchus crippled them, spoilt their roads and broke their waterways.
+European intervention paralyses every attempt they make to establish
+order on their own lines. In the Ming days China did not reek.... And,
+anyhow, Benham, it's better than the silly waste of London....”
+
+And in a little while Prothero discovered that China had tried Benham
+and found him wanting, centuries and dynasties ago.
+
+What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he asked, but the ideal of
+Confucius, the superior person, “the son of the King”? There you had the
+very essence of Benham, the idea of self-examination, self-preparation
+under a vague Theocracy. (“Vaguer,” said Benham, “for the Confucian
+Heaven could punish and reward.”) Even the elaborate sham modesty of the
+two dreams was the same. Benham interrupted and protested with heat. And
+this Confucian idea of the son of the King, Prothero insisted, had been
+the cause of China's paralysis. “My idea of nobility is not traditional
+but expectant,” said Benham. “After all, Confucianism has held together
+a great pacific state far longer than any other polity has ever lasted.
+I'll accept your Confucianism. I've not the slightest objection to
+finding China nearer salvation than any other land. Do but turn it round
+so that it looks to the future and not to the past, and it will be the
+best social and political culture in the world. That, indeed, is what
+is happening. Mix Chinese culture with American enterprise and you will
+have made a new lead for mankind.”
+
+From that Benham drove on to discoveries. “When a man thinks of the past
+he concentrates on self; when he thinks of the future he radiates from
+self. Call me a neo-Confucian; with the cone opening forward away from
+me, instead of focussing on me....”
+
+“You make me think of an extinguisher,” said Prothero.
+
+“You know I am thinking of a focus,” said Benham. “But all your thought
+now has become caricature.... You have stopped thinking. You are
+fighting after making up your mind....”
+
+Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham's prompt endorsement of his
+Chinese identification. He had hoped it would be exasperating. He tried
+to barb his offence. He amplified the indictment. All cultures must
+be judged by their reaction and fatigue products, and Confucianism had
+produced formalism, priggishness, humbug.... No doubt its ideals had had
+their successes; they had unified China, stamped the idea of universal
+peace and good manners upon the greatest mass of population in the
+world, paved the way for much beautiful art and literature and living.
+“But in the end, all your stern orderliness, Benham,” said Prothero,
+“only leads to me. The human spirit rebels against this everlasting
+armour on the soul. After Han came T'ang. Have you never read Ling Po?
+There's scraps of him in English in that little book you have--what is
+it?--the LUTE OF JADE? He was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam
+after the Prophet. Life must relax at last....”
+
+“No!” cried Benham. “If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it is
+creative, no....”
+
+Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven to
+closer enquiries into Chinese thought. He tried particularly to get to
+mental grips with English-speaking Chinese. “We still know nothing of
+China,” said Prothero. “Most of the stuff we have been told about this
+country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle. We send merchants from
+Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what doesn't remind them of
+these delectable standards seems either funny to them or wicked. I admit
+the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to speak, in the ancient characters
+and the ancient traditions, but for all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what
+all the rest of the world has still to find and get. When they begin to
+speak and write in a modern way and handle modern things and break into
+the soil they have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find
+just how much it is behind.... Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not
+such fools as that, but LIFE....”
+
+Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.
+
+He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
+wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
+foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities, delirious
+religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with loaded
+guns, China, even more than America, develops steadily into a massive
+possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism....
+
+The two men followed their associated and disconnected paths. Through
+Benham's chance speeches and notes, White caught glimpses, as one might
+catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that bilateral adventure. He
+saw Benham in conversation with liberal-minded mandarins, grave-faced,
+bald-browed persons with disciplined movements, who sat with their hands
+thrust into their sleeves talking excellent English; while Prothero
+pursued enquiries of an intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of
+a more confidential type. And, presently, Prothero began to discover and
+discuss the merits of opium.
+
+For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, if one is to
+find the solution of life's problem in the rational enjoyment of one's
+sensations, why should one not use opium? It is art materialized.
+It gives tremendous experiences with a minimum of exertion, and if
+presently its gifts diminish one need but increase the quantity.
+Moreover, it quickens the garrulous mind, and steadies the happiness of
+love. Across the varied adventures of Benham's journey in China fell the
+shadow first of a suspicion and then of a certainty....
+
+The perfected and ancient vices of China wrapped about Prothero like
+some tainted but scented robe, and all too late Benham sought to drag
+him away. And then in a passion of disgust turned from him.
+
+“To this,” cried Benham, “one comes! Save for pride and fierceness!”
+
+“Better this than cruelty,” said Prothero talking quickly and clearly
+because of the evil thing in his veins. “You think that you are the only
+explorer of life, Benham, but while you toil up the mountains I board
+the house-boat and float down the stream. For you the stars, for me the
+music and the lanterns. You are the son of a mountaineering don, and I
+am a Chinese philosopher of the riper school. You force yourself beyond
+fear of pain, and I force myself beyond fear of consequences. What
+are we either of us but children groping under the black cloak of our
+Maker?--who will not blind us with his light. Did he not give us also
+these lusts, the keen knife and the sweetness, these sensations that are
+like pineapple smeared with saltpetre, like salted olives from heaven,
+like being flayed with delight.... And did he not give us dreams
+fantastic beyond any lust whatever? What is the good of talking? Speak
+to your own kind. I have gone, Benham. I am lost already. There is
+no resisting any more, since I have drugged away resistance. Why then
+should I come back? I know now the symphonies of the exalted nerves; I
+can judge; and I say better lie and hear them to the end than come back
+again to my old life, to my little tin-whistle solo, my--effort! My
+EFFORT!... I ruin my body. I know. But what of that?... I shall soon be
+thin and filthy. What of the grape-skin when one has had the pulp?”
+
+“But,” said Benham, “the cleanness of life!”
+
+“While I perish,” said Prothero still more wickedly, “I say good
+things....”
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+White had a vision of a great city with narrow crowded streets, hung
+with lank banners and gay with vertical vermilion labels, and of a
+pleasant large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, a garden
+set with artificial stones and with beasts and men and lanterns of white
+porcelain, a garden which overlooked this city. Here it was that Benham
+stayed and talked with his host, a man robed in marvellous silks and
+subtle of speech even in the European languages he used, and meanwhile
+Prothero, it seemed, had gone down into the wickedness of the town
+below. It was a very great town indeed, spreading for miles along the
+banks of a huge river, a river that divided itself indolently into three
+shining branches so as to make islands of the central portion of the
+place. And on this river swarmed for ever a vast flotilla of ships and
+boats, boats in which people lived, boats in which they sought pleasure,
+moored places of assembly, high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger
+sampans, cargo craft, such a water town in streets and lanes, endless
+miles of it, as no other part of the world save China can display. In
+the daylight it was gay with countless sunlit colours embroidered upon
+a fabric of yellow and brown, at night it glittered with a hundred
+thousand lights that swayed and quivered and were reflected quiveringly
+upon the black flowing waters.
+
+And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger who
+was for some reason very vividly realized by White's imagination. He was
+a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken cheeks that made his cheek
+bones very prominent, and gave his thin-lipped mouth something of the
+geniality of a skull, and the arm he thrust out of his yellow robe to
+hand Prothero's message to Benham was lean as a pole. So he stood out in
+White's imagination, against the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs
+and blue haze of the great town below, and was with one exception the
+distinctest thing in the story. The message he bore was scribbled by
+Prothero himself in a nerveless scrawl: “Send a hundred dollars by this
+man. I am in a frightful fix.”
+
+Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage of
+opium, and something in this message stirred his facile indignation.
+Twice before he had had similar demands. And on the whole they had
+seemed to him to be unreasonable demands. He was astonished that while
+he was sitting and talking of the great world-republic of the future and
+the secret self-directed aristocracy that would make it possible,
+his own friend, his chosen companion, should thus, by this inglorious
+request and this ungainly messenger, disavow him. He felt a wave of
+intense irritation.
+
+“No,” he said, “I will not.”
+
+And he was too angry to express himself in any language understandable
+by his messenger.
+
+His host intervened and explained after a few questions that the
+occasion was serious. Prothero, it seemed, had been gambling.
+
+“No,” said Benham. “He is shameless. Let him do what he can.”
+
+The messenger was still reluctant to go.
+
+And scarcely had he gone before misgivings seized Benham.
+
+“Where IS your friend?” asked the mandarin.
+
+“I don't know,” said Benham.
+
+“But they will keep him! They may do all sorts of things when they find
+he is lying to them.”
+
+“Lying to them?”
+
+“About your help.”
+
+“Stop that man,” cried Benham suddenly realizing his mistake. But
+when the servants went to stop the messenger their intentions were
+misunderstood, and the man dashed through the open gate of the garden
+and made off down the winding road.
+
+“Stop him!” cried Benham, and started in pursuit, suddenly afraid for
+Prothero.
+
+The Chinese are a people of great curiosity, and a small pebble
+sometimes starts an avalanche....
+
+White pieced together his conception of the circles of disturbance that
+spread out from Benham's pursuit of Prothero's flying messenger.
+
+For weeks and months the great town had been uneasy in all its ways
+because of the insurgent spirits from the south and the disorder from
+the north, because of endless rumours and incessant intrigue. The stupid
+manoeuvres of one European “power” against another, the tactlessness of
+missionaries, the growing Chinese disposition to meet violence and force
+with violence and force, had fermented and brewed the possibility of an
+outbreak. The sudden resolve of Benham to get at once to Prothero was
+like the firing of a mine. This tall, pale-faced, incomprehensible
+stranger charging through the narrow streets that led to the
+pleasure-boats in the south river seemed to many a blue-clad citizen
+like the White Peril embodied. Behind him came the attendants of
+the rich man up the hill; but they surely were traitors to help this
+stranger.
+
+Before Benham could at all realize what was happening he found his way
+to the river-boat on which he supposed Prothero to be detained, barred
+by a vigorous street fight. Explanations were impossible; he joined in
+the fight.
+
+For three days that fight developed round the mystery of Prothero's
+disappearance.
+
+It was a complicated struggle into which the local foreign traders
+on the river-front and a detachment of modern drilled troops from the
+up-river barracks were presently drawn. It was a struggle that was never
+clearly explained, and at the end of it they found Prothero's body flung
+out upon a waste place near a little temple on the river bank, stabbed
+while he was asleep....
+
+And from the broken fragments of description that Benham let fall, White
+had an impression of him hunting for all those three days through the
+strange places of a Chinese city, along narrow passages, over queer
+Venetian-like bridges, through the vast spaces of empty warehouses, in
+the incense-scented darkness of temple yards, along planks that passed
+to the dark hulls of secret barges, in quick-flying boats that slipped
+noiselessly among the larger craft, and sometimes he hunted alone,
+sometimes in company, sometimes black figures struggled in the darkness
+against dim-lit backgrounds and sometimes a swarm of shining yellow
+faces screamed and shouted through the torn paper windows.... And
+then at the end of this confused effect of struggle, this Chinese
+kinematograph film, one last picture jerked into place and stopped and
+stood still, a white wall in the sunshine come upon suddenly round a
+corner, a dirty flagged passage and a stiff crumpled body that had for
+the first time an inexpressive face....
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+Benham sat at a table in the smoking-room of the Sherborough Hotel
+at Johannesburg and told of these things. White watched him from an
+armchair. And as he listened he noted again the intensification of
+Benham's face, the darkness under his brows, the pallor of his skin, the
+touch of red in his eyes. For there was still that red gleam in Benham's
+eyes; it shone when he looked out of a darkness into a light. And he
+sat forward with his arms folded under him, or moved his long lean hand
+about over the things on the table.
+
+“You see,” he said, “this is a sort of horror in my mind. Things like
+this stick in my mind. I am always seeing Prothero now, and it will take
+years to get this scar off my memory again. Once before--about a horse,
+I had the same kind of distress. And it makes me tender, sore-minded
+about everything. It will go, of course, in the long run, and it's just
+like any other ache that lays hold of one. One can't cure it. One has to
+get along with it....
+
+“I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, but how was I to know
+then that it was so imperative to send that money?...
+
+“At the time it seemed just pandering to his vices....
+
+“I was angry. I shall never subdue that kind of hastiness altogether.
+It takes me by surprise. Before the messenger was out of sight I had
+repented....
+
+“I failed him. I have gone about in the world dreaming of tremendous
+things and failing most people. My wife too....”
+
+He stopped talking for a little time and folded his arms tight and
+stared hard in front of himself, his lips compressed.
+
+“You see, White,” he said, with a kind of setting of the teeth, “this
+is the sort of thing one has to stand. Life is imperfect. Nothing can be
+done perfectly. And on the whole--” He spoke still more slowly, “I would
+go through again with the very same things that have hurt my people. If
+I had to live over again. I would try to do the things without hurting
+the people, but I would do the things anyhow. Because I'm raw with
+remorse, it does not follow that on the whole I am not doing right.
+Right doing isn't balm. If I could have contrived not to hurt these
+people as I have done, it would have been better, just as it would be
+better to win a battle without any killed or wounded. I was clumsy with
+them and they suffered, I suffer for their suffering, but still I have
+to stick to the way I have taken. One's blunders are accidents. If
+one thing is clearer than another it is that the world isn't
+accident-proof....
+
+“But I wish I had sent those dollars to Prothero.... God! White, but
+I lie awake at night thinking of that messenger as he turned away....
+Trying to stop him....
+
+“I didn't send those dollars. So fifty or sixty people were killed
+and many wounded.... There for all practical purposes the thing ends.
+Perhaps it will serve to give me a little charity for some other fool's
+haste and blundering....
+
+“I couldn't help it, White. I couldn't help it....
+
+“The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes on. One thinks, one learns,
+one adds one's contribution of experience and understanding. The spirit
+of the race goes on to light and comprehension. In spite of accidents.
+In spite of individual blundering.
+
+“It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that nobility is so easy as to
+come slick and true on every occasion....
+
+“If one gives oneself to any long aim one must reckon with minor
+disasters. This Research I undertook grows and grows. I believe in it
+more and more. The more it asks from me the more I give to it. When I
+was a youngster I thought the thing I wanted was just round the corner.
+I fancied I would find out the noble life in a year or two, just what
+it was, just where it took one, and for the rest of my life I would live
+it. Finely. But I am just one of a multitude of men, each one going a
+little wrong, each one achieving a little right. And the noble life is
+a long, long way ahead.... We are working out a new way of living for
+mankind, a new rule, a new conscience. It's no small job for all of us.
+There must be lifetimes of building up and lifetimes of pulling down and
+trying again. Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy....
+I see myself now for the little workman I am upon this tremendous
+undertaking. And all my life hereafter goes to serve it....”
+
+He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend. He spoke with a grim
+enthusiasm. “I'm a prig. I'm a fanatic, White. But I have something
+clear, something better worth going on with than any adventure of
+personal relationship could possibly be....”
+
+And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the faith
+that had grown up in his mind. He spoke with a touch of defiance, with
+the tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame. “I will
+tell you what I believe.”
+
+He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow
+development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect
+until he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he refers
+his life to ends and purposes beyond himself. An aristocrat must be
+loyal. So it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must also be
+lucid; there it is that one has at once the demand for kingship and the
+repudiation of all existing states and kings. In this manner he had
+come to his idea of a great world republic that must replace the little
+warring kingdoms of the present, to the conception of an unseen kingship
+ruling the whole globe, to his King Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth
+and all sane loyalty. “There,” he said, “is the link of our order, the
+new knighthood, the new aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth.
+There is our Prince. He is in me, he is in you; he is latent in all
+mankind. I have worked this out and tried it and lived it, and I know
+that outwardly and inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else be
+a poor thing and a base one. On great occasions and small occasions I
+have failed myself a thousand times, but no failure lasts if your faith
+lasts. What I have learnt, what I have thought out and made sure, I
+want now to tell the world. Somehow I will tell it, as a book I suppose,
+though I do not know if I shall ever be able to make a book. But I have
+away there in London or with me here all the masses of notes I have
+made in my search for the life that is worth while living.... We who are
+self-appointed aristocrats, who are not ashamed of kingship, must speak
+to one another....
+
+“We can have no organization because organizations corrupt....
+
+“No recognition....
+
+“But we can speak plainly....”
+
+(As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and voices
+of mounted police riding past the hotel.)
+
+“But on one side your aristocracy means revolution,” said White. “It
+becomes a political conspiracy.”
+
+“Manifestly. An open conspiracy. It denies the king upon the stamps and
+the flag upon the wall. It is the continual proclamation of the Republic
+of Mankind.”
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+The earlier phases of violence in the Rand outbreak in 1913 were
+manifest rather in the outskirts of Johannesburg than at the centre.
+“Pulling out” was going on first at this mine and then that, there were
+riots in Benoni, attacks on strike breakers and the smashing up of
+a number of houses. It was not until July the 4th that, with the
+suppression of a public meeting in the market-place, Johannesburg itself
+became the storm centre.
+
+Benham and White were present at this marketplace affair, a confused
+crowded occasion, in which a little leaven of active men stirred through
+a large uncertain multitude of decently dressed onlookers. The whole
+big square was astir, a swaying crowd of men. A ramshackle platform
+improvised upon a trolley struggled through the swarming straw hats to a
+street corner, and there was some speaking. At first it seemed as though
+military men were using this platform, and then it was manifestly in
+possession of an excited knot of labour leaders with red rosettes. The
+military men had said their say and got down. They came close by Benham,
+pushing their way across the square. “We've warned them,” said one. A
+red flag, like some misunderstood remark at a tea-party, was fitfully
+visible and incomprehensible behind the platform. Somebody was either
+pitched or fell off the platform. One could hear nothing from the
+speakers except a minute bleating....
+
+Then there were shouts that the police were charging. A number of
+mounted men trotted into the square. The crowd began a series of short
+rushes that opened lanes for the passage of the mounted police as they
+rode to and fro. These men trotted through the crowd, scattering knots
+of people. They carried pick-handles, but they did not seem to be
+hitting with them. It became clear that they aimed at the capture of
+the trolley. There was only a feeble struggle for the trolley; it was
+captured and hauled through the scattered spectators in the square
+to the protection of a small impassive body of regular cavalry at the
+opposite corner. Then quite a number of people seemed to be getting
+excited and fighting. They appeared to be vaguely fighting the
+foot-police, and the police seemed to be vaguely pushing through
+them and dispersing them. The roof of a little one-story shop became
+prominent as a centre of vigorous stone-throwing.
+
+It was no sort of battle. Merely the normal inconsecutiveness of human
+affairs had become exaggerated and pugnacious. A meeting was being
+prevented, and the police engaged in the operation were being pelted or
+obstructed. Mostly people were just looking on.
+
+“It amounts to nothing,” said Benham. “Even if they held a meeting, what
+could happen? Why does the Government try to stop it?”
+
+The drifting and charging and a little booing went on for some time.
+Every now and then some one clambered to a point of vantage, began
+a speech and was pulled down by policemen. And at last across the
+confusion came an idea, like a wind across a pond.
+
+The strikers were to go to the Power Station.
+
+That had the effect of a distinct move in the game. The Power Station
+was the centre of Johannesburg's light and energy. There if anywhere it
+would be possible to express one's disapproval of the administration,
+one's desire to embarrass and confute it. One could stop all sorts of
+things from the Power Station. At any rate it was a repartee to the
+suppression of the meeting. Everybody seemed gladdened by a definite
+project.
+
+Benham and White went with the crowd.
+
+At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the
+scattered drift of people became congested. Gliding slowly across the
+mass came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with even its
+glass undamaged, and then another and another. Strikers, with the
+happy expression of men who have found something expressive to do, were
+escorting the trams off the street. They were being meticulously careful
+with them. Never was there less mob violence in a riot. They walked by
+the captured cars almost deferentially, like rough men honoured by a
+real lady's company. And when White and Benham reached the Power House
+the marvel grew. The rioters were already in possession and going freely
+over the whole place, and they had injured nothing. They had stopped
+the engines, but they had not even disabled them. Here too manifestly a
+majority of the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.
+
+“But this is the most civilized rioting,” said Benham. “It isn't
+rioting; it's drifting. Just as things drifted in Moscow. Because nobody
+has the rudder....
+
+“What maddens me,” he said, “is the democracy of the whole thing. White!
+I HATE this modern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was there ever
+an absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the
+men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the
+same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the
+conceit that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just
+a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an
+inkling of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all
+this squalor and evil temper.... What does all this struggle here amount
+to? On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the
+other; suspicion everywhere....
+
+“And you know, White, at bottom THEY ALL WANT TO BE DECENT!
+
+“If only they had light enough in their brains to show them how.
+It's such a plain job they have here too, a new city, the simplest
+industries, freedom from war, everything to make a good life for men,
+prosperity, glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in the air. And
+mismanagement, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, stupidity, poison
+it all. A squabble about working on a Saturday afternoon, a squabble
+embittered by this universal shadow of miner's phthisis that the masters
+were too incapable and too mean to prevent.
+
+“Oh, God!” cried Benham, “when will men be princes and take hold of
+life? When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own?... Look
+at this place! Look at this place!... The easy, accessible happiness!
+The manifest prosperity. The newness and the sunshine. And the silly
+bitterness, the rage, the mischief and miseries!...”
+
+And then: “It's not our quarrel....”
+
+“It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides.
+Life is one long struggle against the incidental. I can feel my anger
+gathering against the Government here in spite of my reason. I want to
+go and expostulate. I have a ridiculous idea that I ought to go off to
+Lord Gladstone or Botha and expostulate.... What good would it do?
+They move in the magic circles of their own limitations, an official, a
+politician--how would they put it?--'with many things to consider....'
+
+“It's my weakness to be drawn into quarrels. It's a thing I have to
+guard against....
+
+“What does it all amount to? It is like a fight between navvies in
+a tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star. It doesn't concern
+us.... Oh! it doesn't indeed concern us. It's a scuffle in the darkness,
+and our business, the business of all brains, the only permanent good
+work is to light up the world.... There will be mischief and hatred
+here and suppression and then forgetfulness, and then things will go on
+again, a little better or a little worse....”
+
+“I'm tired of this place, White, and of all such places. I'm tired of
+the shouting and running, the beating and shooting. I'm sick of all the
+confusions of life's experience, which tells only of one need amidst an
+endless multitude of distresses. I've seen my fill of wars and disputes
+and struggles. I see now how a man may grow weary at last of life and
+its disorders, its unreal exacting disorders, its blunders and its
+remorse. No! I want to begin upon the realities I have made for myself.
+For they are the realities. I want to go now to some quiet corner
+where I can polish what I have learnt, sort out my accumulations, be
+undisturbed by these transitory symptomatic things....
+
+“What was that boy saying? They are burning the STAR office.... Well,
+let them....”
+
+And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things
+that hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the
+sky and the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights down
+side streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the making of
+greatness and a new great spirit in men. All the rest of his life, he
+said, must be given to that. He would say his thing plainly and honestly
+and afterwards other men would say it clearly and beautifully; here it
+would touch a man and there it would touch a man; the Invisible King in
+us all would find himself and know himself a little in this and a little
+in that, and at last a day would come, when fair things and fine things
+would rule the world and such squalor as this about them would be as
+impossible any more for men as a Stone Age Corroboree....
+
+Late or soon?
+
+Benham sought for some loose large measure of time.
+
+“Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes....
+
+“Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred years
+or ten thousand years? It will never come in our lives, White. Not soon
+enough for that. But after that everything will be soon--when one comes
+to death then everything is at one's fingertips--I can feel that greater
+world I shall never see as one feels the dawn coming through the last
+darkness....”
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at lunch
+in the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the burning
+of the STAR office. The Sherborough dining-room was on the first floor,
+and the Venetian window beside their table opened on to a verandah
+above a piazza. As they talked they became aware of an excitement in the
+street below, shouting and running and then a sound of wheels and the
+tramp of a body of soldiers marching quickly. White stood up and looked.
+“They're seizing the stuff in the gunshops,” he said, sitting down
+again. “It's amazing they haven't done it before.”
+
+They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at
+Mukden that had won Benham's admiration....
+
+A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass
+smashing. Then more revolver shots. “That's at the big club at the
+corner, I think,” said Benham and went out upon the verandah.
+
+Up and down the street mischief was afoot. Outside the Rand Club in
+the cross street a considerable mass of people had accumulated, and
+was being hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers. Down the street
+people were looking in the direction of the market-place and then
+suddenly a rush of figures flooded round the corner, first a froth
+of scattered individuals and then a mass, a column, marching with an
+appearance of order and waving a flag. It was a poorly disciplined body,
+it fringed out into a swarm of sympathizers and spectators upon the
+side walk, and at the head of it two men disputed. They seemed to be
+differing about the direction of the whole crowd. Suddenly one smote the
+other with his fist, a blow that hurled him sideways, and then turned
+with a triumphant gesture to the following ranks, waving his arms in
+the air. He was a tall lean man, hatless and collarless, greyhaired and
+wild-eyed. On he came, gesticulating gauntly, past the hotel.
+
+And then up the street something happened. Benham's attention was turned
+round to it by a checking, by a kind of catch in the breath, on the part
+of the advancing procession under the verandah.
+
+The roadway beyond the club had suddenly become clear. Across it a dozen
+soldiers had appeared and dismounted methodically and lined out, with
+their carbines in readiness. The mounted men at the club corner had
+vanished, and the people there had swayed about towards this new
+threat. Quite abruptly the miscellaneous noises of the crowd ceased.
+Understanding seized upon every one.
+
+These soldiers were going to fire....
+
+The brown uniformed figures moved like automata; the rifle shots rang
+out almost in one report....
+
+There was a rush in the crowd towards doorways and side streets, an
+enquiring pause, the darting back of a number of individuals into the
+roadway and then a derisive shouting. Nobody had been hit. The soldiers
+had fired in the air.
+
+“But this is a stupid game,” said Benham. “Why did they fire at all?”
+
+The tall man who had led the mob had run out into the middle of the
+road. His commando was a little disposed to assume a marginal position,
+and it had to be reassured. He was near enough for Benham to see his
+face. For a time it looked anxious and thoughtful. Then he seemed to
+jump to his decision. He unbuttoned and opened his coat wide as if
+defying the soldiers. “Shoot,” he bawled, “Shoot, if you dare!”
+
+A little uniform movement of the soldiers answered him. The small figure
+of the officer away there was inaudible. The coat of the man below
+flapped like the wings of a crowing cock before a breast of dirty shirt,
+the hoarse voice cracked with excitement, “Shoot, if you dare. Shoot, if
+you dare! See!”
+
+Came the metallic bang of the carbines again, and in the instant the
+leader collapsed in the road, a sprawl of clothes, hit by half a dozen
+bullets. It was an extraordinary effect. As though the figure had been
+deflated. It was incredible that a moment before this thing had been a
+man, an individual, a hesitating complicated purpose.
+
+“Good God!” cried Benham, “but--this is horrible!”
+
+The heap of garments lay still. The red hand that stretched out towards
+the soldiers never twitched.
+
+The spectacular silence broke into a confusion of sounds, women
+shrieked, men cursed, some fled, some sought a corner from which they
+might still see, others pressed forward. “Go for the swine!” bawled a
+voice, a third volley rattled over the heads of the people, and in
+the road below a man with a rifle halted, took aim, and answered the
+soldiers' fire. “Look out!” cried White who was watching the soldiers,
+and ducked. “This isn't in the air!”
+
+Came a straggling volley again, like a man running a metal hammer very
+rapidly along iron corrugations, and this time people were dropping all
+over the road. One white-faced man not a score of yards away fell with
+a curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for some yards with blood
+running abundantly from his neck, and fell and never stirred again.
+Another went down upon his back clumsily in the roadway and lay wringing
+his hands faster and faster until suddenly with a movement like a sigh
+they dropped inert by his side. A straw-hatted youth in a flannel suit
+ran and stopped and ran again. He seemed to be holding something red and
+strange to his face with both hands; above them his eyes were round
+and anxious. Blood came out between his fingers. He went right past
+the hotel and stumbled and suddenly sprawled headlong at the opposite
+corner. The majority of the crowd had already vanished into doorways and
+side streets. But there was still shouting and there was still a remnant
+of amazed and angry men in the roadway--and one or two angry women. They
+were not fighting. Indeed they were unarmed, but if they had had weapons
+now they would certainly have used them.
+
+“But this is preposterous!” cried Benham. “Preposterous. Those soldiers
+are never going to shoot again! This must stop.”
+
+He stood hesitating for a moment and then turned about and dashed for
+the staircase. “Good Heaven!” cried White. “What are you going to do?”
+
+Benham was going to stop that conflict very much as a man might go to
+stop a clock that is striking unwarrantably and amazingly. He was going
+to stop it because it annoyed his sense of human dignity.
+
+White hesitated for a moment and then followed, crying “Benham!”
+
+But there was no arresting this last outbreak of Benham's all too
+impatient kingship. He pushed aside a ducking German waiter who was
+peeping through the glass doors, and rushed out of the hotel. With
+a gesture of authority he ran forward into the middle of the street,
+holding up his hand, in which he still held his dinner napkin clenched
+like a bomb. White believes firmly that Benham thought he would be able
+to dominate everything. He shouted out something about “Foolery!”
+
+Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sublime indifference to
+current things....
+
+But the carbines spoke again.
+
+Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against something invisible. He
+spun right round and fell down into a sitting position. He sat looking
+surprised.
+
+After one moment of blank funk White drew out his pocket handkerchief,
+held it arm high by way of a white flag, and ran out from the piazza of
+the hotel.
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+“Are you hit?” cried White dropping to his knees and making himself as
+compact as possible. “Benham!”
+
+Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought answered in a strange voice,
+a whisper into which a whistling note had been mixed.
+
+“It was stupid of me to come out here. Not my quarrel. Faults on both
+sides. And now I can't get up. I will sit here a moment and pull myself
+together. Perhaps I'm--I must be shot. But it seemed to come--inside
+me.... If I should be hurt. Am I hurt?... Will you see to that book of
+mine, White? It's odd. A kind of faintness.... What?”
+
+“I will see after your book,” said White and glanced at his hand because
+it felt wet, and was astonished to discover it bright red. He forgot
+about himself then, and the fresh flight of bullets down the street.
+
+The immediate effect of this blood was that he said something more about
+the book, a promise, a definite promise. He could never recall his
+exact words, but their intention was binding. He conveyed his absolute
+acquiescence with Benham's wishes whatever they were. His life for that
+moment was unreservedly at his friend's disposal....
+
+White never knew if his promise was heard. Benham had stopped speaking
+quite abruptly with that “What?”
+
+He stared in front of him with a doubtful expression, like a man who is
+going to be sick, and then, in an instant, every muscle seemed to give
+way, he shuddered, his head flopped, and White held a dead man in his
+arms.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
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+
+<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" lang="en">
+  <head>
+    <title>
+      The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
+    </title>
+    <style type="text/css" xml:space="preserve">
+
+    body { margin:5%; background:#faebd0; text-align:justify}
+    P { text-indent: 1em; margin-top: .25em; margin-bottom: .25em; }
+    H1,H2,H3,H4,H5,H6 { text-align: center; margin-left: 15%; margin-right: 15%; }
+    hr  { width: 50%; text-align: center;}
+    .foot { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; text-indent: -3em; font-size: 90%; }
+    blockquote {font-size: 97%; font-style: italic; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%;}
+    .mynote    {background-color: #DDE; color: #000; padding: .5em; margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 95%;}
+    .toc       { margin-left: 10%; margin-bottom: .75em;}
+    .toc2      { margin-left: 20%;}
+    div.fig    { display:block; margin:0 auto; text-align:center; }
+    div.middle { margin-left: 20%; margin-right: 20%; text-align: justify; }
+    .figleft   {float: left; margin-left: 0%; margin-right: 1%;}
+    .figright  {float: right; margin-right: 0%; margin-left: 1%;}
+    .pagenum   {display:inline; font-size: 70%; font-style:normal;
+               margin: 0; padding: 0; position: absolute; right: 1%;
+               text-align: right;}
+    pre        { font-style: italic; font-size: 90%; margin-left: 10%;}
+
+</style>
+  </head>
+  <body>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Research Magnificent
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: August 3, 2008 [EBook #1138]
+Last Updated: March 2, 2018
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: UTF-8
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Donald Lainson, and David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <p>
+      <br /><br />
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      by H. G. Wells
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h3>
+      1915
+    </h3>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <h2>
+      Contents
+    </h2>
+    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
+      <tr>
+        <td>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> <b>THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT</b> </a>
+          </p>
+          <br />
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> <b>THE PRELUDE</b> </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY </a>
+          </p>
+          <br />
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> <b>THE STORY</b> </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0001"> CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE BOY GROWS UP </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0002"> CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT
+            TOWN </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0003"> CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ AMANDA </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0004"> CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE SPIRITED
+            HONEYMOON </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0005"> CHAPTER THE FIFTH ~~ THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY
+            </a>
+          </p>
+          <p class="toc">
+            <a href="#link2HCH0006"> CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ THE NEW HAROUN AL
+            RASCHID </a>
+          </p>
+        </td>
+      </tr>
+    </table>
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br />
+    </p>
+    <hr />
+    <p>
+      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <h1>
+      THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+    </h1>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE PRELUDE
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;the aristocratic life.&rdquo;
+       But by &ldquo;aristocratic&rdquo; 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&mdash;it is a
+      thing easier to understand than to say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One might hesitate to call this idea &ldquo;innate,&rdquo; 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&mdash;&ldquo;No, do not bandage my
+      eyes&rdquo;&mdash;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. &ldquo;Porphyry,&rdquo; his mother had discovered before he was seventeen, &ldquo;is an
+      excellent boy, a brilliant boy, but, I begin to see, just a little
+      unbalanced.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the story of him, is that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Most of us are&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;practicable things. For Benham,
+      exceptionally, there were not these practicable things. He blundered, he
+      fell short of himself, he had&mdash;as you will be told&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And when he discovered&mdash;and in this he was assisted not a little by
+      his friend at his elbow&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;one hesitates to call it a book&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;BUT WHY THE DEVIL
+      AREN'T WE?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then life&mdash;life would be the wonder it so perplexingly just
+      isn't....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;But this will never make a book,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a confession,
+      not a diary. It was&mdash;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 &ldquo;aristocratic&rdquo; 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&mdash;at the end only its ideals of fearlessness and
+      generosity remained.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;Bushido&rdquo; written with a particularly flourishing capital letter and twice
+      repeated. &ldquo;That was inevitable,&rdquo; said White with the comforting regret one
+      feels for a friend's banalities. &ldquo;And it dates... [unreadable] this was
+      early....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Modern aristocracy, the new aristocracy,&rdquo; he read presently, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The story began with the schoolfellow he had known at Minchinghampton
+      School.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The combination of apparently stout heart and manifestly weak stomach had
+      exercised the Minchinghampton intelligence profoundly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;hath said in his heart there is no God.&rdquo;
+       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 &ldquo;soundly flogged&rdquo; by his head master. &ldquo;Years afterwards that boy came
+      back to thank &mdash;&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Gurr,&rdquo; said Prothero softly. &ldquo;STEW&mdash;ard!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your turn next, Benham,&rdquo; whispered an orthodox controversialist.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Lord! I'd like to see him,&rdquo; said Benham with a forced loudness that
+      could scarcely be ignored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The subsequent controversy led to an interview with the head. From it
+      Benham emerged more whitely strung up than ever. &ldquo;He said he would
+      certainly swish me if I deserved it, and I said I would certainly kill him
+      if he did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;not
+      one.... And because I choose to say what I think!... I'd run amuck.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Fear&mdash;the
+      First Limitation,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;NOW say you don't believe in God?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And anyhow,&rdquo; said Benham, when it was clear that he was not to be struck
+      dead forthwith, &ldquo;you show a poor idea of your God to think he'd kill a
+      schoolboy for honest doubt. Even old Roddles&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't listen to you,&rdquo; cried Latham the humourist, &ldquo;I can't listen to
+      you. It's&mdash;HORRIBLE.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, who began it?&rdquo; asked Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Oh
+      WOW!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Latham's voice came out of the darkness. &ldquo;This ATHEISM that you and Billy
+      Prothero have brought into the school&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He started violently at another vivid flash, and every one remained
+      silent, waiting for the thunder....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Fear, the First Limitation&rdquo;&mdash;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. &ldquo;Fear,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;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&mdash;futility.
+      The beginning of all aristocracy is the subjugation of fear.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At first the struggle was so great that he hated fear without any
+      qualification; he wanted to abolish it altogether.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I was a boy,&rdquo; he writes, &ldquo;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&mdash;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;adequacy of enterprise,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;his bull adventure
+      rather increased than diminished that disposition&mdash;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. &ldquo;My small mind was
+      overwhelmed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had never thought,&rdquo; White read, &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and looked
+      over my head with yellow eyes&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember that he took me in his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'It's only a big sort of pussy, Poff,' he said. 'FELIS TIGRIS. FELIS, you
+      know, means cat.'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I knew better. I was in no mood then for my father's insatiable
+      pedagoguery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'And my little son mustn't be a coward.'...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;.
+      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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the poor old wretch was
+      still able to make a bleating sound at that&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;the only hotel it was in those
+      days&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He could not bring himself to do that.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The peasant surveyed him from the further side.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be afraid!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn!&rdquo; whispered Benham, but he took the hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Afterwards, rather ignobly, he tried to explain in his public-school
+      French. &ldquo;Pas de peur,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Pas de peur. Mais la tete, n'a pas
+      l'habitude.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The peasant, failing to understand, assured him again that there was no
+      danger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (&ldquo;Damn!&rdquo;)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now,&rdquo; said Benham to himself, &ldquo;if I do not go back along the planks my
+      secret honour is gone for ever.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;what can we call it?&mdash;the taming of fear, the nature,
+      care, and management of fear....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;and going on dropping. We were
+      both strapped, and I got my feet against the side and clung to the locked
+      second wheel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the point I want to insist upon is that I did not feel afraid. I was
+      simply enormously, terribly INTERESTED....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I remember a jerk and a feeling that I was flying up again. I was
+      astonished by a tremendous popping&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There again the chief feeling was a sense of oddity. I wasn't sorry for
+      him any more than I was for myself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It seemed to me that it was all right with us both, remarkable, vivid,
+      but all right....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am sure that was so....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;life beyond fear&rdquo;; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These things,&rdquo; Benham had written, &ldquo;are much more horrible when one
+      considers them from the point of view of an easy-chair&rdquo;;&mdash;White gave
+      an assenting nod&mdash;&ldquo;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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mm,&rdquo; said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his brows and
+      shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;still reminiscent of the maternal lair.&rdquo; But fear has very
+      little hold upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme
+      readiness to resentment and rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Like most inexperienced people,&rdquo; ran his notes, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, &ldquo;This brings
+      me to God.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The devil it does!&rdquo; said White, roused to a keener attention.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Surely the man was not a Christian!)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to sleep. He
+      felt full of life and anxious for happenings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      (Surely it had been silent during the day.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead grass and the leaves.
+      In the day the air had been still.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;a nightjar!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;HUNT, HUNT&rdquo;; that might be a deer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite close at
+      hand. A monkey?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were
+      bats....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;low, monotonous&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life than he
+      was now.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand and so
+      inaccessible....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the jungle before him. Was it after all so inaccessible?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come!&rdquo; the road said to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the moonlight and stood
+      motionless.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was he afraid?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;staring unblinkingly as cats stare at a fire&mdash;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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was he afraid?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That question determined him to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes, this was very wonderful and beautiful, and there must always be
+      jungles for men to walk in. Always there must be jungles....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A thorn caught at him and he disentangled himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Curiosity made Benham draw nearer, very softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The uproar of the bears died away at last, almost abruptly, and left the
+      jungle to the incessant night-jars....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For what end was this life of the jungle?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Man must keep hard, man must also keep fierce. Will the jungle keep him
+      fierce?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For life, thought Benham, there must be insecurity....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had missed the track....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;.
+      It was the croaking of frogs. Ahead was a solitary gleam. He was
+      approaching a jungle pool....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Suddenly the stillness was alive, in a panic uproar. &ldquo;HONK!&rdquo; cried a great
+      voice, and &ldquo;HONK!&rdquo; There was a clatter of hoofs, a wild rush&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke hoarsely. &ldquo;I am Man,&rdquo; he said, and lifted a hand as he spoke.
+      &ldquo;The Thought of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man,&rdquo; he said, in a voice that had no sound, and took a step forward.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wough!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked on towards the deserted tank and now he was talking aloud.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I understand the jungle. I understand.... If a few men die here, what
+      matter? There are worse deaths than being killed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is this fool's trap of security?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Every time in my life that I have fled from security I have fled from
+      death....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You sleeping away there in the cities! Do you know what it means for you
+      that I am here to-night?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you know what it means to you?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am just one&mdash;just the precursor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Presently, if you will not budge, those hot cities must be burnt about
+      you. You must come out of them....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat very still indeed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He must have slept soundly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He heard a cock crow, and another answer&mdash;jungle fowl these must be,
+      because there could be no village within earshot&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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,&mdash;but that
+      was nonsense, it was the crest of a steep hillside covered with woods of
+      teak.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood up and stretched himself, and wondered whether he had dreamed of
+      a tiger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tried to remember and retrace the course of his over-night wanderings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and then
+      far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly and
+      thoughtfully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It had been no dream.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      THE STORY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0001" id="link2HCH0001">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE BOY GROWS UP
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;ship-shape,&rdquo; 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&mdash;with its
+      method of manual training for example&mdash;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. &ldquo;After my visits to her,&rdquo; wrote Benham, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have read my father's articles upon this subject,&rdquo; wrote Benham, &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;His heart failed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Once or twice, too, he seemed to be reaching out at me from the school
+      pulpit.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;the one living
+      purpose&rdquo; of his life, to be off to Minchinghampton and the next step in
+      the mysterious ascent of the English educational system.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; said the father over his study pipe and with his glasses fixed on
+      remote distances above the head of the current sympathizer, &ldquo;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,&mdash;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&mdash;God knows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did his very best to make it a wrench.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Sir,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;WELL, little man, my
+      son,&rdquo; she would cry in her happy singing voice, &ldquo;WELL?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;What have
+      you been doing?&rdquo; she asked, &ldquo;since I saw you last.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The horse bolted&mdash;and you stuck on? Did you squeak? I stick on, but
+      I HAVE to squeak. But you&mdash;of course, No! you mustn't. I'm just a
+      little woman. And I ride big horses....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And for the end she had invented a characteristic little ceremony.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She would stand up in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders and
+      look into his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Clean eyes?&rdquo; she would say, &ldquo;&mdash;still?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;GO,&rdquo; she would say.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That was the end.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
+      fairyland to this grey world again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;feelings.&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;whatever
+      she meant by that&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;or a tremendously popular poet. As a rule she saw
+      him unmarried&mdash;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tell me all that you are doing NOW,&rdquo; she said to him one afternoon when
+      she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington Manor.
+      &ldquo;How do you like Cambridge? Are you making friends? Have you joined that
+      thing&mdash;the Union, is it?&mdash;and delivered your maiden speech? If
+      you're for politics, Poff, that's your game. Have you begun it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You must make good friends,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He knew one of the Baptons.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff,&rdquo; she said suddenly, &ldquo;has it ever occurred to you what you are going
+      to do afterwards. Do you know you are going to be quite well off?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. &ldquo;My father said something. He
+      was rather vague. It wasn't his affair&mdash;that kind of thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will be quite well off,&rdquo; she repeated, without any complicating
+      particulars. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;HOW well off?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have several thousands a year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Thousands?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;Mother, this is rather astounding.... Does this mean there are
+      estates somewhere, responsibilities?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is just money. Investments.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, I've imagined&mdash;. I've thought always I should have to DO
+      something.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Was he in the right set? Was he indeed in the right college? Trinity, by
+      his account, seemed a huge featureless place&mdash;and might he not
+      conceivably be LOST in it? In those big crowds one had to insist upon
+      oneself. Poff never insisted upon himself&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who IS this Billy Prothero?&rdquo; she asked one evening in the walled
+      garden.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was at Minchinghampton.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who IS he? Who is his father? Where does he come from?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sought in his mind for a space. &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;And does he call himself
+      a Socialist?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;I THOUGHT he would.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff,&rdquo; she cried suddenly, &ldquo;you're not a SOCIALIST?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Such a vague term.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But these friends of yours&mdash;they seem to be ALL Socialists. Red ties
+      and everything complete.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They have ideas,&rdquo; he evaded. He tried to express it better. &ldquo;They give
+      one something to take hold of.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat up stiffly on the garden-seat. She lifted her finger at him, very
+      seriously. &ldquo;I hope,&rdquo; she said with all her heart, &ldquo;that you will have
+      nothing to do with such ideas. Nothing. SOCIALISM!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They make a case.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pooh! Any one can make a case.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;absolutely&mdash;RUBBISH....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and it had
+      always turned out remarkably well.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish sometimes,&rdquo; his mother said abruptly, with an unusually sharp note
+      in her voice, &ldquo;that you wouldn't look quite so like your father.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm NOT like my father!&rdquo; said Benham puzzled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer reason,
+      &ldquo;so why should you go LOOKING like him? That CONCERNED expression....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She jumped to her feet. &ldquo;Poff,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;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&mdash;as God meant them to do. What stupid
+      things we human beings are!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most baffling of all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;inseparables.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wasn't going to be bullied by a beast,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suppose it had been an elephant?&rdquo; Prothero cried.... &ldquo;A mad elephant?...
+      A pack of wolves?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was too honest not to see that he was entangled. &ldquo;Well, suppose in
+      YOUR case it had been a wild cat?... A fierce mastiff?... A mastiff?... A
+      terrier?... A lap dog?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but my case is that there are limits.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was impatient at the idea of limits. With a faintly malicious
+      pleasure Prothero lugged him back to that idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We both admit there are limits,&rdquo; Prothero concluded. &ldquo;But between the
+      absolutely impossible and the altogether possible there's the region of
+      risk. You think a man ought to take that risk&mdash;&rdquo; He reflected. &ldquo;I
+      think&mdash;no&mdash;I think NOT.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If he feels afraid,&rdquo; cried Benham, seeing his one point. &ldquo;If he feels
+      afraid. Then he ought to take it....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After a digestive interval, Prothero asked, &ldquo;WHY? Why should he?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?&mdash;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. &ldquo;You can't build your honour on fudge,
+      Benham. Like committing sacrilege&mdash;in order to buy a cloth for the
+      altar.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      By that Benham was slipped from the recognized code and launched upon
+      speculations which became the magnificent research.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Because Benham made it perfectly clear what he had thought and felt about
+      this hat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Of course,&mdash;ah, yes, I know him, I know him. Yes, I did him a
+      little service&mdash;in '96.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And something in his manner would suggest a satisfaction, or a
+      dissatisfaction with confidential mysteries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You shoot, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You hunt, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know Scotland well, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ride much, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never been across a horse in my life, Lady Marayne.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut, tut,&rdquo; said Sir Godfrey. &ldquo;Why!&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've never had a chance of riding. And I think I'm afraid of horses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's only an excuse,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne. &ldquo;Everybody's afraid of horses
+      and nobody's really afraid of horses.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm not used to horses. You see&mdash;I live on my mother. And she
+      can't afford to keep a stable.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His hostess did not see his expression of discomfort. Her pretty eyes were
+      intent upon the peas with which she was being served.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does your mother live in the country?&rdquo; she asked, and took her peas with
+      fastidious exactness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero coloured brightly. &ldquo;She lives in London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All the year.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But isn't it dreadfully hot in town in the summer?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero had an uncomfortable sense of being very red in the face. This
+      kept him red. &ldquo;We're suburban people,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I thought&mdash;isn't there the seaside?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My mother has a business,&rdquo; said Prothero, redder than ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;O-oh!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne. &ldquo;What fun that must be for her?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a real business, and she has to live by it. Sometimes it's a worry.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But a business of her own!&rdquo; She surveyed the confusion of his visage with
+      a sweet intelligence. &ldquo;Is it an amusing sort of business, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero looked mulish. &ldquo;My mother is a dressmaker,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;In Brixton.
+      She doesn't do particularly badly&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Marayne felt she had unmasked Prothero almost indecently. Whatever
+      happened there must be no pause. There must be no sign of a hitch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But it's good at tennis,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You DO play tennis, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I&mdash;I gesticulate,&rdquo; said Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Marayne, still in flight from that pause, went off at a tangent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff, my dear,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I've had a diving-board put at the deep end of
+      the pond.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The remark hung unanswered for a moment. The transition had been too quick
+      for Benham's state of mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you swim, Mr. Prothero?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prothero mopped up the lot of us at Minchinghampton with his diving and
+      swimming,&rdquo; Benham explained, and the tension was relaxed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;&ldquo;And it didn't wear a
+      hedge or anything,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne. &ldquo;That was what they didn't quite
+      like. Swimming in an undraped pond....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But people ought not to go about having dressmakers for mothers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And coming into other people's houses and influencing their sons....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night when everything was over Billy sat at the writing-table of his
+      sumptuous bedroom&mdash;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,&mdash;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 &ldquo;Sir&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Billy puffed out his cheeks to blow a sigh, and then decided to be angry
+      and say &ldquo;Damn!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prothero,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you know what my father is.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought he ran a preparatory school.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was the profoundest resentment in Prothero's voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, all the same, I'm going to be a rich man.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand,&rdquo; said Prothero, without any shadow of congratulation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What would you do, Prothero, if you found yourself saddled with some
+      thousands a year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Godfathers don't grow in Brixton,&rdquo; said Prothero concisely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what am I to do, Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does all THIS belong to you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, this is my mother's.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Godfather too?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've not thought.... I suppose so. Or her own.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero meditated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THIS life,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;this large expensiveness&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He left his criticism unfinished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I agree. It suits my mother somehow. I can't understand her living in any
+      other way. But&mdash;for me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What can one do with several thousands a year?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero's interest in this question presently swamped his petty personal
+      resentments. &ldquo;I suppose,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. SOME.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero's interest was growing as he faced the possibilities.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've dreamt of a paper,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;a paper that should tell the brute
+      truth about things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know that I'm particularly built to be a journalist,&rdquo; Benham
+      objected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're not,&rdquo; said Billy.... &ldquo;You might go into Parliament as a perfectly
+      independent member.... Only you wouldn't get in....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not a speaker,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Billy, &ldquo;if you don't decide on a game, you'll just go on
+      like this. You'll fall into a groove, you'll&mdash;you'll hunt. You'll go
+      to Scotland for the grouse.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For the moment Prothero had no further suggestions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham waited for a second or so before he broached his own idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Benham, that's the thin end of aristocracy!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's one's own look-out,&rdquo; said Benham, after reflection.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, it's bound to happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham retreated a little from the immediate question.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero frowned over this, and then he made a sweeping proposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;YOU CANNOT HAVE ARISTOCRACY,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;BECAUSE, YOU SEE&mdash;ALL MEN
+      ARE RIDICULOUS. Democracy has to fight its way out from under plutocracy.
+      There is nothing else to be done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But a man in my position&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a ridiculous position. You may try to escape being ridiculous. You
+      won't succeed.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned at the open window, held out a long forefinger, and uttered his
+      countervailing faith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero reflected. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better, pride than dishonour,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;better the pretentious life
+      than the sordid life. What else is there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A life isn't necessarily sordid because it isn't pretentious,&rdquo; said
+      Prothero, his voice betraying a defensive disposition.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But a life with a large income MUST be sordid unless it makes some sort
+      of attempt to be fine....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Wait till I have a mount for him.&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This struck Prothero as an inadequate statement of the Socialist project
+      and he made an unsuccessful attempt to get it amended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Billy perceived no way of explaining away this version of his Socialism
+      that would not involve uncivil contradictions&mdash;and nobody ever
+      contradicted Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Lady Marayne, don't you think there is a lot of disorder and
+      injustice in the world?&rdquo; he protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There would be ever so much more if your Socialists had their way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But still, don't you think&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;To deny aristocracy is to deny
+      the existence of the fittest. It is on the existence of the fittest that
+      progress depends.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do our social conditions exalt the fittest?&rdquo; asked Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is another question,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Sir Godfrey. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So far as I can understand Mr. Prothero,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne, &ldquo;he thinks
+      that all the inferiors are the superiors and all the superiors inferior.
+      It's quite simple....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At last came the hour of tipping. An embarrassed and miserable Prothero
+      went slinking about the house distributing unexpected gold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was stupid, it was damnable; he had had to borrow the money from his
+      mother....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;He has ideas!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What are ideas? England may yet be ruined by ideas.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One glowing afternoon in October, as these two young men came over
+      Magdalen Bridge after a long disputatious and rather tiring walk to
+      Drayton&mdash;they had been talking of Eugenics and the &ldquo;family&rdquo;&mdash;Benham
+      was almost knocked down by an American trotter driven by Lord Breeze.
+      &ldquo;Whup there!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lord Breeze grinned the sort of grin a man remembers. And passed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damnation!&rdquo; said Benham with a face that had become suddenly very white.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then presently. &ldquo;Any fool can do that who cares to go to the trouble.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That,&rdquo; said Prothero, taking up their unquenchable issue, &ldquo;that is the
+      feeling of democracy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I walk because I choose to,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The thing rankled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This equestrianism,&rdquo; he began, &ldquo;is a matter of time and money&mdash;time
+      even more than money. I want to read. I want to deal with ideas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Any fool can drive....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Exactly,&rdquo; said Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero made a noise of sympathetic assent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In a country where equestrianism is assertion I suppose one must be
+      equestrian....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prothero,&rdquo; he said in hall next day, &ldquo;we are going to drive to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Benham,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;have you ever driven before?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;NEVER,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going to now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Why are you doing this?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to do it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Benham, is it&mdash;EQUESTRIAN?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham made no audible reply. They proceeded resolutely in silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is mine,&rdquo; said Benham compactly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is yours, sir,&rdquo; said an ostler.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He looks&mdash;QUIET.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'll find him fresh enough, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham made a complicated ascent to the driver's seat and was handed the
+      reins. &ldquo;Come on,&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;Check,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Sorry,&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;this isn't a trotter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn't get a trotter,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I would try this sort of thing before I tried a trotter,&rdquo; he
+      added.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then suddenly came disaster.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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. &ldquo;God!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whoa!&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;Whoa!&rdquo; but also, unfortunately, he sawed hard at
+      the horse's mouth.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry,&rdquo; he was saying. &ldquo;Somebody ought to have been in charge of the
+      barrow. Here are my cards. I am ready to pay for any damage....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The barrow ought not to have been there....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, I am going on. Of course I'm going on. Thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Check!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But when he got to the fork between the Huntingdon Road and the Cottenham
+      Road, both roads were clear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Going pretty fast 'e was,&rdquo; said the road-mender, &ldquo;and whipping 'is
+      'orse. Else you might 'a thought 'e was a boltin' with 'im.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You all right, Benham?&rdquo; cried Prothero, advancing into the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Whoa!&rdquo; said Benham, and the horse stopped. &ldquo;Are you coming up, Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero clambered up beside him. &ldquo;I was anxious,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There was no need to be.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've broken your whip.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. It broke.... GET up!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They proceeded on their way to Cambridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Something has happened to the wheel,&rdquo; said Prothero, trying to be at his
+      ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Merely a splinter or so. And a spoke perhaps.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And what is this behind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham made a half-turn of the head. &ldquo;It's a motor-bicycle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero took in details.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some of it is missing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, the front wheel is under the seat.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did you find it?&rdquo; Prothero asked, after an interval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He ran into a motor-car&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero glanced at the splinters in the wheel with a renewed interest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did your wheel get into it?&rdquo; he asked. Benham affected not to hear. He
+      was evidently in no mood for story-telling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you get down, Prothero?&rdquo; he asked abruptly, with the note of
+      suppressed anger thickening his voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero became vividly red. &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; he said, after an interval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I DO,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For three days the two friends avoided each other, and then Prothero went
+      to Benham's room. Benham was smoking cigarettes&mdash;Lady Marayne, in the
+      first warmth of his filial devotion, had prohibited his pipe&mdash;and
+      reading Webb's INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY. &ldquo;Hello!&rdquo; he said coldly, scarcely
+      looking up, and continued to read that absorbing work.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I keep on thinking how I jumped down from that damned dog-cart,&rdquo; said
+      Prothero, without any preface.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It didn't matter in the least,&rdquo; said Benham distantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! ROT,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;I behaved like a coward.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham shut his book.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Benham,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;You are right about aristocracy, and I am wrong.
+      I've been thinking about it night and day.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham betrayed no emotion. But his tone changed. &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;there
+      are cigarettes and whiskey in the corner. Don't make a fuss about a
+      trifle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No whiskey,&rdquo; said Billy, and lit a cigarette. &ldquo;And it isn't a trifle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to Benham's hearthrug. &ldquo;That business,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;has changed all
+      my views. No&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham said nothing, but he put down Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and reached
+      out for and got and lit a cigarette.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;that you don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do what?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Funk.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;aloud. I had an inkling
+      of it&mdash;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy, don't be an old ass,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both young men paused for a moment. They made no demonstrations. But the
+      strain was at an end between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've thought it all out,&rdquo; Billy went on with a sudden buoyancy. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The habit of pride.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. And then&mdash;then we are lords of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this, Billy,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;I steadfastly believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've seen it all now,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;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&mdash;even as
+      these dons we see about us&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;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&mdash;I wish
+      I could do so too.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why not?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;this afternoon. But it
+      won't last. YOU&mdash;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&mdash;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;you've the boldest mind that ever I met.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero's face lit with satisfaction. Then his countenance fell again. &ldquo;I
+      know I'm better there,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stuck one leg over the arm of his chair. &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;come
+      and be&mdash;equestrian and stop this nonsense.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damn it&mdash;you DIVE!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd go in before me if a woman was drowning.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can,&rdquo; said Billy, &ldquo;you can. But not I! Heavens, the TROUBLE of it!
+      The riding-school! The getting up early! No!&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's not so great.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not so great! I don't mean the essential expense. But&mdash;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&mdash;. Benham! how much
+      did your little expedition the other day&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short and regarded his friend with round eyes and raised
+      eyebrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A reluctant grin overspread Benham's face. He was beginning to see the
+      humour of the affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Billy regarded his toes and cleared his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Depending as I do on a widowed mother in Brixton for all the expenditure
+      that isn't covered by my pot-hunting&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;it wasn't a fair sample afternoon.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's footer,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;we might both play footer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or boxing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, anyhow, you must come with me when I drive again. I'm going to start
+      a trotter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I miss another drive may I be&mdash;lost for ever,&rdquo; said Billy, with
+      the utmost sincerity. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall enjoy it very much,&rdquo; said Prothero in a small voice after an
+      interval for reflection. &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He did so and Benham strolled to the window and stood looking out upon the
+      great court.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might do something this afternoon,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Splendid idea,&rdquo; reflected Billy over his whiskey. &ldquo;Living hard and
+      thinking hard. A sort of Intelligentsia that is BLOODED.... I shall, of
+      course, come as far as I can with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      13
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;Go slowly, speak to the man at the back.&rdquo;
+       It brought up memories of his own experiences, of rows of gaslit faces,
+      and of a friendly helpful voice that said, &ldquo;Speak up?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;White's
+      world was the literary world, and that is how it looked to him&mdash;which
+      profess to set out the lives of men, this part of the journey, this
+      crucial passage among the Sphinxes, is still done&mdash;when it is done at
+      all&mdash;slightly, evasively. Why?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White fell back on his professionalism. &ldquo;It does not make a book. It makes
+      a novel into a treatise, it turns it into a dissertation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White returned from an unprofitable digression to the matter before him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      14
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you must admit some men are taller than others?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then the others are broader.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some are smaller altogether.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nimbler&mdash;it's notorious.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some of the smaller are less nimble than the others.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then they have better nightmares. How can you tell?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and the talk went on over his
+      prostrate attempts to rally and protest.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping and great violence, and a
+      volley of obscure French colloquialisms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was understood to convey that the speaker was a Jew, and did not in the
+      least mean what he was saying....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      15
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had called it ARISTOCRACY. But he was far away by now from
+      political aristocracy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We see life,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't any choice of Hercules I mean, any mere alternative whether we
+      will be, how shall I put it?&mdash;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&mdash;that's the old and perpetual choice, that
+      has always been&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or&mdash;we are lost....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (&ldquo;Swill of this brimming world,&rdquo; said White. &ldquo;Some of this sounds
+      uncommonly like Prothero.&rdquo; He mused for a moment and then resumed his
+      reading.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (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.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man has reached a point when a new life opens before him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0002" id="link2HCH0002">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SECOND ~~ THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Tobias&rdquo;
+       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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have all been Tobias in our time,&rdquo; said White.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This man Merkle seemed quite unaware that humanity &ldquo;here and now&rdquo;&mdash;even
+      as he was engaged in meticulously putting out Benham's clothes&mdash;was
+      &ldquo;leaving its ancestral shelters and going out upon the greatest adventure
+      that ever was in space or time.&rdquo; If he had been told as much by Benham he
+      would probably have said, &ldquo;Indeed, sir,&rdquo; and proceeded accurately with his
+      duties. And if Benham's voice had seemed to call for any additional
+      remark, he would probably have added, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;He never would help me with
+      any of this business,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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,
+      &ldquo;the world at his feet.&rdquo; 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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Why particularly am I picked out for so tremendous
+      an advantage?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;PECUNIA NON OLET,&rdquo; Benham wrote, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But his thoughts had gone wider and deeper than that....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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&mdash;No!&mdash;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&mdash;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero always pleased Benham when he swept away empires. There was
+      always a point when the rhetoric broke into gesture.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We've got to sweep them away, Benham,&rdquo; he said, with a wide gesture of
+      his arm. &ldquo;We've got to sweep them all away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The only sane political work for an intelligent man is to get the
+      world-state ready. For that we have to prepare an aristocracy&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your world-state will be aristocratic?&rdquo; some one interpolated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; he added, pipe in mouth, as he poured out his whiskey, &ldquo;it's
+      a big undertaking. It's an affair of centuries....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then, as a further afterthought: &ldquo;All the more reason for getting to
+      work at it....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In his moods of inspiration Prothero would discourse through the tobacco
+      smoke until that great world-state seemed imminent&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;and
+      neglecting the Frenchman, the Russian, the German, the American, the
+      Indian, the Chinaman, and, indeed, the greater part of mankind from the
+      problem&mdash;might become the other....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;for all that he was capable of doing. All this had awaited
+      him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!&mdash;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!&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;Galvanized
+      Corpse.&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;If I were
+      you,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;provided it was not
+      from the party point of view a vexatious or impossible line&mdash;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&mdash;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, &ldquo;a perfect fount....&rdquo; Two other people, independently of each other,
+      pointed out to Benham the helpfulness of a few articles in the half-crown
+      monthlies....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are the assumptions underlying all this?&rdquo; Benham asked himself in a
+      phase of lucidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And after reflection. &ldquo;Good God! The assumptions! What do they think will
+      satisfy me?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Get right out of all this while you are young,&rdquo; he
+      said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He gave the diplomatic service as a second choice. &ldquo;There you
+      are,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;since Teddy has Europeanized 'em....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Even the Reverend Harold Benham took a subdued but thoughtful share in his
+      son's admonition. He came up to the flat&mdash;due precautions were taken
+      to prevent a painful encounter&mdash;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. &ldquo;There are few men,
+      Poff, who would not envy you your opportunities,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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&mdash;and
+      ambitious&mdash;I thought that some day I might belong to the
+      Athenaeum.... One has to learn....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;everybody did that&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so to this....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very wonderful and delicious, this first indulgence of sense.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was shabby and underhand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Priapus....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was the most subtle, delightful and tender of created beings.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had amazing streaks of vulgarity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And some astonishing friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Once she had seemed to lead the talk deliberately to money matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She loved him and desired him. There was no doubt of it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nevertheless his mind was as a whole pervaded by the feeling that he ought
+      not to have been taken by surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And he had the clearest conviction in his mind that if now he could be put
+      back again to the day before that lunch....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      No! he should not have gone there to lunch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had gone there to see her Clementi piano.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had he or had he not thought beforehand of any other possibility?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On a point so vital his memory was curiously unsure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Where?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With some men.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a pause and then his mother's voice came, flattened by
+      disappointment. &ldquo;Very well then, little Poff. Perhaps I shall see you
+      to-morrow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damned liar!&rdquo; he said, and then, &ldquo;Dirty liar!&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      As he turned up New Bond Street he saw a figure that struck him as
+      familiar. Surely!&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It came into Benham's head for the first time that life could be tiresome.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;THAT!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good night, dear,&rdquo; a woman drifted by him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've SAID good night,&rdquo; he cried, &ldquo;I've SAID good night,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Oh, God!&rdquo; he said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then: &ldquo;Oh! The DIRTINESS of life! The dirty muddle of life!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What are we doing with life? What are we all doing with life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't only this poor Milly business. This only brings it to a head. Of
+      course she wants money....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His thoughts came on again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But the ugliness!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did I begin it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After a long interval his mind moved again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      WHAT ARE WE UP TO WITH LIFE! WHAT ARE WE MAKING OF LIFE!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But hadn't he intended to make something tremendous of life? Hadn't he
+      come to London trailing a glory?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;God!&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;How did I
+      get there?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then suddenly he reached out his arms in the darkness and prayed aloud
+      to the silences.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, God! Give me back my visions! Give me back my visions!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was to be done?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the first place he must get away and think about it all, think himself
+      clear of all these&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He wanted to get right away from London and everybody and lie in the quiet
+      darkness and stare up at the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Merkle came in to him in the morning he was fast asleep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The familiar curtain rings awakened Benham. He turned his head over,
+      stared for a moment and then remembered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Merkle,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am going for a walking tour. I am going off this
+      morning. Haven't I a rucksack?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You 'ave a sort of canvas bag, sir, with pockets to it,&rdquo; said Merkle.
+      &ldquo;Will you be needing the VERY 'eavy boots with 'obnails&mdash;Swiss, I
+      fancy, sir&mdash;or your ordinary shooting boots?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And when may I expect you back, sir?&rdquo; asked Merkle as the moment for
+      departure drew near.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;God knows,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;I don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then will there be any address for forwarding letters, sir?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham hadn't thought of that. For a moment he regarded Merkle's
+      scrupulous respect with a transient perplexity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll let you know, Merkle,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I'll let you know.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some days at least, notes, telephone messages, engagements, all this
+      fuss and clamour about nothing, should clamour for him in vain....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how closely,&rdquo; cried White, in a mood of cultivated enthusiasm; &ldquo;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&mdash;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was he to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They at any rate were not troubled with the problem of what to do with
+      their lives.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      13
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What work am I going to do? What work am I going to do?&rdquo; He repeated it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But in this pellucid air things took their proper proportions again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And now what was he to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Politics,&rdquo; he said aloud to the turf and the sky.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;It's not
+      for me to judge them,&rdquo; he decided, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Or else, why shouldn't I go down there and pick up a shovel and set to
+      work? To make leisure for my betters....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and
+      Mrs. Skelmersdale.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But how is one to be a political man when one is not in politics?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham frowned at the Weald. His ideas were running thin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He lifted a second finger. How to learn? For it was learning that he had
+      to do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then in a little while the party conflict would swallow him up?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The party game had not altogether swallowed &ldquo;Mr. Arthur.&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But every one is not a Balfour....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Food?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      14
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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. (&ldquo;Not TOO sparingly,&rdquo; 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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      15
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better die with the Excelsior chap up the mountains,&rdquo; the defence
+      interjected.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Than what?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Consider the quality Benham had already betrayed. He was manifestly
+      incapable of a decent modest mediocre existence. Already he had ceased to
+      be&mdash;if one may use so fine a word for genteel abstinence&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't smug about in a state of falsified righteousness like these
+      Crampton chaps.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been sliding fast to it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;NO! I'M DAMNED IF I DO!...&rdquo; 16
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Nearly dinner-time....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;simply. Why drag in the thought of emptiness
+      just at this point?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was very early to go to bed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When one thinks of sleeping out under the stars one is apt to forget the
+      dew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;what was that? Soft and large and
+      quite near and noiseless. An owl!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat up and sneezed violently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something squealed in the bushes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;And a liqueur?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had some Benedictine!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One could not slight such sympathetic helpfulness. The Benedictine was
+      genuine. And then came the coffee.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cup of coffee was generously conceived and honestly made.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A night of clear melancholy ensued....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      17
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;he ought not to have gone there to lunch. After that he
+      began composing letters at a great rate. Delicate&mdash;explanatory. Was
+      it on the whole best to be explanatory?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was going to be a tremendous job, this breaking with her. And it had
+      begun so easily....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said grimly, &ldquo;it must end,&rdquo; and rolled over and stared at the
+      black....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;whether one has a
+      justification or whether one hasn't.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And so on and so on and so on....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      18
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The second day opened rather dully for Benham. There was not an idea left
+      in his head about anything in the world. It was&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Continence by preoccupation;&rdquo; he tried the phrase....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This set the key of his thought throughout the afternoon&mdash;until
+      Amanda happened to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0003" id="link2HCH0003">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE THIRD ~~ AMANDA
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda happened to Benham very suddenly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham detested dog-fights. He stood up, pale and distressed. &ldquo;Lie down!&rdquo;
+       he cried. &ldquo;Shut up, you brutes!&rdquo; and was at a loss for further action.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda seized the fallen stick and whacked the dog she held, reasonably
+      but effectively until its yelps satisfied her. &ldquo;There!&rdquo; she said pitching
+      her victim from her, and stood erect again. She surveyed the proceedings
+      of her helper for the first time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You needn't,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;choke Sultan anymore.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ugh!&rdquo; she said, as though that was enough for Sultan. And peace was
+      restored.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm obliged to you. But&mdash;... I say! He didn't bite you, did he? Oh,
+      SULTAN!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;SORRY! So Sultan by his code of eye and tail.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;May I see?... Something ought to be done to this....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She took his wrist in her hand, and her cheek and eyelashes came within a
+      foot of his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Some observant element in his composition guessed, and guessed quite
+      accurately, that she was nineteen....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;&ldquo;she's always so RECKLESS with those dogs,&rdquo; 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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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&mdash;&ldquo;In the spring sunshine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You live in London?&rdquo; said Mrs. Wilder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yes. And he had wanted to think things out. In London one could do no
+      thinking&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here we do nothing else,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Except dog-fights,&rdquo; said the elder cousin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought I would just wander and think and sleep in the open air. Have
+      you ever tried to sleep in the open air?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the summer we all do,&rdquo; said the younger cousin. &ldquo;Amanda makes us. We
+      go out on to the little lawn at the back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see Amanda has some friends at Limpsfield. And there they all go out
+      and camp and sleep in the woods.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; reflected Mrs. Wilder, &ldquo;in April it must be different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It IS different,&rdquo; said Benham with feeling; &ldquo;the night comes five hours
+      too soon. And it comes wet.&rdquo; He described his experiences and his flight
+      to Shere and the kindly landlord and the cup of coffee. &ldquo;And after that I
+      thought with a vengeance.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you write things?&rdquo; asked Amanda abruptly, and it seemed to him with a
+      note of hope.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. No, it was just a private puzzle. It was something I couldn't get
+      straight.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you have got it straight?&rdquo; asked Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were making up your mind about something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda DEAR!&rdquo; cried her mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I don't mind telling you,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I wanted to think about was what I should do with my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't you any WORK&mdash;?&rdquo; asked the elder cousin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None that I'm obliged to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's where a man has the advantage,&rdquo; said Amanda with the tone of
+      profound reflection. &ldquo;You can choose. And what are you going to do with
+      your life?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; her mother protested, &ldquo;really you mustn't!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going round the world to think about it,&rdquo; Benham told her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'd give my soul to travel,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She addressed her remark to the salad in front of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But have you no ties?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Wilder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;None that hold me,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were you,&rdquo; said Amanda, and reflected. Then she half turned herself
+      to him. &ldquo;I should go first to India,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;and I should shoot, one,
+      two, three, yes, three tigers. And then I would see Farukhabad Sikri&mdash;I
+      was reading in a book about it yesterday&mdash;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&mdash;... And
+      then I would think what I would do next.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All alone, Amanda?&rdquo; asked Mrs. Wilder.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only when I shoot tigers. You and mother should certainly come to Japan.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Mr. Benham perhaps doesn't intend to shoot tigers, Amanda?&rdquo; said
+      Amanda's mother.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Asia Minor ought to be fun,&rdquo; said Amanda. &ldquo;But I should prefer India
+      because of the tigers. It would be so jolly to begin with the tigers right
+      away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is the towns and governments and peoples I want to see rather than
+      tigers,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Tigers if they are in the programme. But I want to
+      find out about&mdash;other things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't you think there's something to be found out at home?&rdquo; said the
+      elder cousin, blushing very brightly and speaking with the effort of one
+      who speaks for conscience' sake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Betty's a Socialist,&rdquo; Amanda said to Benham with a suspicion of apology.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, we're all rather that,&rdquo; Mrs. Wilder protested.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you are free, if you are independent, then don't you owe something to
+      the workers?&rdquo; Betty went on, getting graver and redder with each word.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's just because of that,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;that I am going round the
+      world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was as free with these odd people as if he had been talking to
+      Prothero. They were&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;profiteering.&rdquo; &ldquo;Consider that
+      chair,&rdquo; he said. But Benham had little feeling for the craftsmanship of
+      chairs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under cross-examination Mr. Rathbone-Sanders became entangled and
+      prophetic. It was evident he had never thought out his &ldquo;democratic,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She came down vehemently on Benham's.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course, Mr. Rathbone-Sanders,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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, &ldquo;I felt there was
+      a sword in her spirit. I felt she was as clean as the wind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;roll and rollick in women&rdquo; 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&mdash;in
+      armour, weightless armour&mdash;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&mdash;and fled....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;Come back again,&rdquo; she had cried.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I found this
+      in a book-shop,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I brought it for you, because it describes
+      one of the best dreams of aristocracy there has ever been dreamt.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When Benham got back to London he experienced an unwonted desire to
+      perform his social obligations to the utmost.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; she wrote, &ldquo;the Guardians are inhuman, but it was a
+      glorious sort of inhumanity. They had a spirit&mdash;like sharp knives
+      cutting through life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+      &ldquo;Yes, mam,&rdquo; he heard Merkle's voice, &ldquo;yes, mam. I will tell him, mam. Will
+      you keep possession, mam.&rdquo; And then in the doorway of the study, &ldquo;Mrs.
+      Skelmersdale, sir. Upon the telephone, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham reflected with various notes in his hand. Then he went to the
+      telephone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You Wicked Boy, where have you been hiding?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've been away. I may have to go away again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not before you have seen me. Come round and tell me all about it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham lied about an engagement.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then to-morrow in the morning.&rdquo;... Impossible.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In the afternoon. You don't WANT to see me.&rdquo; Benham did want to see her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Further lies. &ldquo;Look here,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;can you come and have a talk in
+      Kensington Gardens? You know the place, near that Chinese garden.
+      Paddington Gate....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The lady's voice fell to flatness. She agreed. &ldquo;But why not come to see me
+      HERE?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham hung up the receiver abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked slowly back to his study. &ldquo;Phew!&rdquo; 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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;this stupid mystery. Of course you're
+      bound to be found out, and of course there will be a scandal.&rdquo;... He
+      perceived that this last note was written on his own paper. &ldquo;Merkle!&rdquo; he
+      cried sharply.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yessir!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Merkle had been just outside, on call.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did my mother write any of these notes here?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two, sir. Her ladyship was round here three times, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Did she see all these letters?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not the telephone calls, sir. I 'ad put them on one side. But.... It's a
+      little thing, sir.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused and came a step nearer. &ldquo;You see, sir,&rdquo; he explained with the
+      faintest flavour of the confidential softening his mechanical respect,
+      &ldquo;yesterday, when 'er ladyship was 'ere, sir, some one rang up on the
+      telephone&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you, Merkle&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Must have been,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Certainly&mdash;must have been. And the
+      call you think came from&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went out of London to think about my life.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was manifest that Lady Marayne did not believe him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Alone?&rdquo; she asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;STUFF!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;I was worried,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;London is too
+      crowded to think in. I wanted to get myself alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She awaited his explanations. Benham looked for a moment like his father.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not getting on, mother,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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&mdash;and wasting existence. It's
+      rather difficult sometimes to tell what one thinks and feels&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had not really listened to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is that woman,&rdquo; she interrupted suddenly, &ldquo;Mrs. Fly-by-Night, or some
+      such name, who rings you up on the telephone?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham hesitated, blushed, and regretted it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Skelmersdale,&rdquo; he said after a little pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all the same. Who is she?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a woman I met at a studio somewhere, and I went with her to one of
+      those Dolmetsch concerts.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Marayne considered him in silence for a little while. &ldquo;All men,&rdquo; she
+      said at last, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's&mdash;she's very good&mdash;in her way. She's had a difficult
+      life....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't leave a man about for a moment,&rdquo; Lady Marayne reflected. &ldquo;Poff,
+      I wish you'd fetch me a glass of water.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When he returned she was looking very fixedly into the fire. &ldquo;Put it
+      down,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;anywhere. Poff! is this Mrs. Helter-Skelter a discreet
+      sort of woman? Do you like her?&rdquo; She asked a few additional particulars
+      and Benham made his grudging admission of facts. &ldquo;What I still don't
+      understand, Poff, is why you have been away.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I went away,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;because I want to clear things up.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But why? Is there some one else?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You went alone? All the time?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've told you I went alone. Do you think I tell you lies, mother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Everybody tells lies somehow,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne. &ldquo;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&mdash;or something of the
+      sort. And this seems a comparatively slight one. I wish it hadn't
+      happened. They do happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      An expression of perplexity came into her face. She looked at him. &ldquo;Why do
+      you want to throw her over?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I WANT to throw her over,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      From overhead he said to her: &ldquo;I want to get away from this complication,
+      this servitude. I want to do some&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she's in the way?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He assented.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You men!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne after a little pause. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was unexpected....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;STUFF!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne for a second time. &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;well.
+      Your Mrs. Fly-by-Night,&mdash;oh it doesn't matter!&mdash;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I want to start round the world,&rdquo; he cried with a note of acute
+      distress. &ldquo;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&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;India!&rdquo; cried Lady Marayne. &ldquo;The East. Poff, what is the MATTER with you?
+      Has something happened&mdash;something else? Have you been having a love
+      affair?&mdash;a REAL love affair?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, DAMN love affairs!&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;Mother!&mdash;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&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see,&rdquo; cried Lady Marayne, &ldquo;I see. I've bored you. I might have known I
+      should have bored you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've NOT bored me!&rdquo; cried Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He threw himself on the rug at her feet. &ldquo;Oh, mother!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've bored you,&rdquo; she wept.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've done all I can for you, planned for you, given all my time for you
+      and I've BORED you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mother!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't come near me, Poff! Don't TOUCH me! All my plans. All my ambitions.
+      Friends&mdash;every one. You don't know all I've given up for you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Go away from me! How can you help me? All I've done has been a failure!
+      Failure! Failure!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That night the silences of Finacue Street heard Benham's voice again. &ldquo;I
+      must do my job,&rdquo; he was repeating, &ldquo;I must do my job. Anyhow....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then after a long pause, like a watchword and just a little unsurely:
+      &ldquo;Aristocracy....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One sort of woman perhaps....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;STUFF!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won't you?&rdquo; said Mrs. Skelmersdale,
+      brimming over. &ldquo;You will do that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He couldn't keep his arm from her little shoulders. And as their lips
+      touched he suddenly found himself weeping also....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This sex business was a damnable business. If only because it made one
+      hurt women....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened and
+      tempered, who would understand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; she said, hanging only for a moment, and then: &ldquo;you told me you were
+      alone!&rdquo;...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I asked you if you were alone you pretended to be angry,&rdquo; she
+      remembered with a flash. &ldquo;You said, 'Do I tell lies?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I WAS alone. Until&mdash; It was an accident. On my walk I was alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he flinched before her accusing, her almost triumphant, forefinger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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&mdash;Was she painted, Poff?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I don't know who they are. How should I know? What need is
+      there to know?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are ways of finding out,&rdquo; she insisted. &ldquo;If I am to go down and
+      make myself pleasant to these people because of you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I implore you not to.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And five minutes ago you were imploring me to! Of course I shall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh well!&mdash;well!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One has to know SOMETHING of the people to whom one commits oneself,
+      surely.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are decent people; they are well-behaved people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&mdash;I'll behave well. Don't think I'll disgrace your casual
+      acquaintances. But who they are, what they are, I WILL know....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      On that point Lady Marayne was to score beyond her utmost expectations.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come round,&rdquo; she said over the telephone, two mornings later. &ldquo;I've
+      something to tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She was so triumphant that she was sorry for him. When it came to telling
+      him, she failed from her fierceness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff, my little son,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I'm so sorry I hardly know how to tell
+      you. Poff, I'm sorry. I have to tell you&mdash;and it's utterly beastly.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These people are dreadful people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You've heard of the great Kent and Eastern Bank smash and the Marlborough
+      Building Society frauds eight or nine years ago?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Vaguely. But what has that to do with them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That man Morris.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stopped short, and Benham nodded for her to go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Her father,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But who was Morris? Really, mother, I don't remember.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He was sentenced to seven years&mdash;ten years&mdash;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&mdash; He had a signet ring with prussic
+      acid in it&mdash;...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I remember now,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A silence fell between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stood quite motionless on the hearthrug and stared very hard at the
+      little volume of Henley's poetry that lay upon the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He cleared his throat presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You can't go and see them then,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;After all&mdash;since I am
+      going abroad so soon&mdash;... It doesn't so very much matter.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm going round the world,&rdquo; he told them simply. &ldquo;I may be away for two
+      years, and I thought I would like to see you all again before I started.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was quite the way they did things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;so much to be
+      done,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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: &ldquo;Why did you come down here?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to see you before I went.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You disturb me. You fill me with envy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't think of that. I wanted to see you again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;look at them!&mdash;are my highest. And while you
+      are travelling I shall think of you&mdash;and think of you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would YOU like to travel?&rdquo; he asked as though that was an extraordinary
+      idea.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you think EVERY girl wants to sit at home and rock a cradle?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never thought YOU did.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what did you think I wanted?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What DO you want?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She held her arms out widely, and the moonlight shone in her eyes as she
+      turned her face to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just what you want,&rdquo; she said; &ldquo;&mdash;THE WHOLE WORLD!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Life is like a feast,&rdquo; she went on; &ldquo;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&mdash;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&mdash;except to school at
+      Chichester and three or four times to Emsworth and Bognor&mdash;for eight
+      years. When you go&rdquo;&mdash;the tears glittered in the moonlight&mdash;&ldquo;I
+      shall cry. It will be worse than the excursion to London.... Ever since
+      you were here before I've been thinking of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;But why
+      shouldn't you come too?&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stared at him in silence. The two white-lit faces examined each other.
+      Both she and Benham were trembling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;COME TOO?&rdquo; she repeated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;HOW?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly she was weeping like a child that is teased; her troubled
+      eyes looked out from under puckered brows. &ldquo;You don't mean it,&rdquo; she said.
+      &ldquo;You don't mean it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then indeed he meant it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Marry me,&rdquo; he said very quickly, glancing towards the dark group at the
+      end of the garden. &ldquo;And we will go together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized her arm and drew her to him. &ldquo;I love you,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I love your
+      spirit. You are not like any one else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a moment's hesitation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Both he and she looked to see how far they were still alone.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then they turned their dusky faces to each other. He drew her still
+      closer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she said, and yielded herself to be kissed. Their lips touched, and
+      for a moment he held her lithe body against his own.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want you,&rdquo; he whispered close to her. &ldquo;You are my mate. From the first
+      sight of you I knew that....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They embraced&mdash;alertly furtive.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't TELL any one,&rdquo; she whispered eagerly shaking his arm to emphasize
+      her words. &ldquo;Don't tell any one&mdash;not yet. Not for a few days....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She pushed him from her quickly as the shadowy form of Betty appeared in a
+      little path between the artichokes and raspberry canes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Listening to the nightingales?&rdquo; cried Betty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, aren't they?&rdquo; said Amanda inconsecutively.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's our very own nightingale!&rdquo; cried Betty advancing. &ldquo;Do you hear it,
+      Mr. Benham? No, not that one. That is a quite inferior bird that performs
+      in the vicarage trees....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash; 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, &ldquo;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....&rdquo; And Mrs. Skelmersdale
+      too would say, &ldquo;Of course he just talked of the world and duty and all
+      that rubbish to save my face....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It wasn't so at all.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it looked so frightfully like it!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't tell any one,&rdquo; she had said, &ldquo;not for a few days....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A human being,&rdquo; White read, &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;MOO&rdquo; and a pitiful gesture with his arm,
+      and fled forth....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a curate and he was weeping bitterly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stood in the doorway and watched a clumsy broken-hearted flight
+      down the village street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;why was the curate in tears?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;intelligently and calmly.
+      Her pose had a divine dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to tell them now,&rdquo; said Benham without a word of greeting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;tell them now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They heard steps in the passage outside. &ldquo;Betty!&rdquo; cried Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her mother's voice answered, &ldquo;Do you want Betty?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We want you all,&rdquo; answered Amanda. &ldquo;We have something to tell you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Carrie!&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;We want to tell you something,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda and I are going to marry each other,&rdquo; said Benham, standing in
+      front of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For an instant the others made no answer; they looked at each other.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;BUT DOES HE KNOW?&rdquo; Mrs. Morris said in a low voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I KNOW,&rdquo; he said, and then, &ldquo;I do not see that it matters to us in the
+      least.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went to her holding out both his hands to her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She took them and stood shyly for a moment, and then the watchful gravity
+      of her face broke into soft emotion. &ldquo;Oh!&rdquo; she cried and seized his face
+      between her hands in a passion of triumphant love and kissed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he found himself being kissed by Mrs. Morris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0004" id="link2HCH0004">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;life force&rdquo; 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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Confound you, Amanda!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd forgotten my existence, you star-gazing Cheetah. And then, you see,
+      these things happen to you!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well&mdash;DON'T.... I distrust your thinking. This coast is wilder and
+      grimmer than yesterday. It's glorious....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She sat down on the chair he unfolded for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is there nothing to eat?&rdquo; she asked abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is too early.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This coast is magnificent,&rdquo; she said presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's hideous,&rdquo; he answered. &ldquo;It's as ugly as a heap of slag.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's nature at its wildest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That's Amanda at her wildest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, isn't it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&rdquo;!&mdash;he indicated the sleepers forward by a
+      movement of his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose they WERE rather feeble people,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Venetians.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They were traders&mdash;and nothing more. Just as we are. And when they
+      were rich they got splendid clothes and feasted and rested. Much as we
+      do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda surveyed him. &ldquo;We don't rest.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We idle.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are seeing things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't be a humbug, Amanda. We are making love. Just as they did. And it
+      has been&mdash;ripping. In Salona they made love tremendously. They did
+      nothing else until the barbarians came over the mountains....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well,&rdquo; said Amanda virtuously, &ldquo;we will do something else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham picked up the thread of his musing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was aroused by Amanda's voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When we go back to London, old Cheetah,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we must take a
+      house.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For some moments he stared at her, trying to get back to their point of
+      divergence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; he asked at length.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We must have a house,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; she thought it out, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her clear hazel eyes contemplated conflicts and triumphs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was roused by Benham's voice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What the deuce are you thinking of, Amanda?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She turned her level eyes to his. &ldquo;London,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;For you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want London,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought you did. You ought to. I do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But to take a house! Make an invasion of London!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You dear old Cheetah, you can't be always frisking about in the
+      wilderness, staring at the stars.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I'm not going back to live in London in the old way, theatres,
+      dinner-parties, chatter&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She met his consternation fairly. She lifted her fine eyebrows. Her little
+      face conveyed a protesting reasonableness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, MUSTN'T we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She added, &ldquo;If we want to alter the world we ought to live in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Since last they had disputed the question she had thought out these new
+      phrases.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Cheetah, don't you give way to your early morning habit of
+      calling your own true love a fool,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Simply I tell you I will not go back to London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will go back with me, Cheetah.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will go back as far as my work calls me there.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think,&rdquo; he said slowly, &ldquo;that this wanting to take London by storm is a
+      beastly VULGAR thing to want to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda compressed her lips.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to work out things in my mind,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;I do not want to be
+      distracted by social things, and I do not want to be distracted by
+      picturesque things. This life&mdash;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!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He got up and walked to the side of the boat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She surveyed his back for some moments. Then she went and leant over the
+      rail beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to go to London,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where do you want to go?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where I can see into the things that hold the world together.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have loved this wandering&mdash;I could wander always. But... Cheetah!
+      I tell you I WANT to go to London.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked over his shoulder into her warm face. &ldquo;NO,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, I ask you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shook his head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her face closer and whispered. &ldquo;Cheetah! big beast of my heart. Do
+      you hear your mate asking for something?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his eyes back to the mountains. &ldquo;I must go my own way.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Haven't I, so far, invented things, made life amusing, Cheetah? Can't you
+      trust the leopard's wisdom?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at the coast inexorably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder,&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ARE that, Cheetah, that lank, long, EAGER beast&mdash;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well.&rdquo; She wrinkled her brows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look here, Amanda!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;by
+      THAT, then may I be damned for an uxorious fool!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes met his and there was mockery in her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This, Cheetah, is the morning mood,&rdquo; she remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the essential mood. Listen, Amanda&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped short. He looked towards the gangway, they both looked. The
+      magic word &ldquo;Breakfast&rdquo; came simultaneously from them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Eggs,&rdquo; she said ravenously, and led the way.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A smell of coffee as insistent as an herald's trumpet had called a truce
+      between them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Curates,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;are such
+      pent-up men. One ought, I suppose, to remember that. But he never had
+      anything to go upon at all&mdash;not anything&mdash;except his own
+      imaginations.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I suppose when you met him you were nice to him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was nice to him, of course....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moods began in which he seemed to forget Amanda altogether.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;their white walls were covered by one
+      monstrously great and old wisteria in flower&mdash;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. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In these dear little nests they ought to have put lovers,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, of course, YOU would have made the place Thelema....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But as they went shaking and bumping back along the evil road to Milan, he
+      fell into a deep musing. Suddenly he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;idlers, excursionists. In a world we ought to rule....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda, we've got to get to work....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Accursed things,&rdquo; he would say, as he flung some importunate
+      cripple at a church door a ten-centime piece; &ldquo;why were they born? Why do
+      they consent to live? They are no better than some chance fungus that is
+      because it must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It takes all sorts to make a world,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nonsense,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Where is the megatherium? That sort of creature
+      has to go. Our sort of creature has to end it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why did you give it money?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because&mdash; I don't want the thing to be more wretched than it is. But
+      if I could prevent more of them&mdash;... What am I doing to prevent
+      them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;These beggars annoy you,&rdquo; said Amanda after a pause. &ldquo;They do me. Let us
+      go back into the mountains.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But he fretted in the mountains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was, for example, the remarkable affair of the drive from Macugnaga
+      to Piedimulera.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Bellissima,&rdquo; &ldquo;bravissima,&rdquo; &ldquo;signorina,&rdquo; &ldquo;Inglesa,&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His bill, which he presented with an uneasy flourish, was large and
+      included the carozza.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No wonder he charged for it before we saw it,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's better than walking,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The company in the inn gathered behind the landlord and scrutinized Amanda
+      and Benham intelligently. The young couple got in. &ldquo;Avanti,&rdquo; said Benham,
+      and Amanda bestowed one last ineradicable memory on the bowing landlord.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; cried Amanda suddenly. &ldquo;This isn't safe.&rdquo; &ldquo;Ah!&rdquo; 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.
+      &ldquo;ASPETTO,&rdquo; he said, but he meant &ldquo;Stop!&rdquo; The driver understood that he
+      meant &ldquo;Stop,&rdquo; and obeyed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Albergo cattivissimo,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Cattivissimo! Pranzo cattivissimo
+      'orrido. Cavallo cattivissimo, dangerousissimo. Gioco abominablissimo,
+      damnissimo. Capisce. Eh?&rdquo; [*]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * This is vile Italian. It may&mdash;with a certain charity to
+     Benham&mdash;be rendered: &ldquo;The beastliest inn! The beastliest!
+     The beastliest, most awful lunch! The vilest horse! Most
+     dangerous! Abominable trick! Understand?&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The landlord made deprecatory gestures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;YOU understand all right,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Da me il argento per il carozzo.
+      Subito?&rdquo; [*]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * &ldquo;Give me back the money for the carriage. QUICKLY!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      The landlord was understood to ask whether the signor no longer wished for
+      the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SUBITO!&rdquo; cried Benham, and giving way to a long-restrained impulse seized
+      the padrone by the collar of his coat and shook him vigorously.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were dissuasive noises from the company, but no attempt at rescue.
+      Benham released his hold.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Adesso!&rdquo; said Benham. [*]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * &ldquo;NOW!&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;Dio have mercy on your sinful
+      soul. See! Capisce? That's all.&rdquo; [*]
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+     * &ldquo;Now we will go with this beastly horse to Piedimulera. If
+     we get there safely I will pay. If we have an accident,
+     then&mdash;&rdquo;
+ </pre>
+    <p>
+      He turned to Amanda. &ldquo;Get back into the thing,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo; He came to
+      the doorway and with a magnificent gesture commanded the perplexed driver
+      to turn the carriage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      While that was being done he discoursed upon his adjacent
+      fellow-creatures. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know it's dangerous, Cheetah. The horse is a shier. That man is blind
+      in one eye.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get back into the carriage,&rdquo; said Benham, whitely angry. &ldquo;I AM GOING TO
+      DRIVE!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But&mdash;!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Just for a moment Amanda looked scared. Then with a queer little laugh she
+      jumped in again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda was never a coward when there was excitement afoot. &ldquo;We'll smash!&rdquo;
+       she cried, by no means woefully.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Get up beside me,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The recovering landlord became voluble in the doorway.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Piedimulera pagero,&rdquo; said Benham over his shoulder and brought the
+      whip across the white outstanding ribs. &ldquo;Get up!&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda gripped the sides of the seat as the carriage started into motion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laid the whip on again with such vigour that the horse forgot
+      altogether to shy at the urchin that had scared it before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; said Benham leaning back. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MIND!&rdquo; screamed Amanda and recalled him to his duties. He was off the
+      road and he had narrowly missed an outstanding chestnut true.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you don't,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Safe now,&rdquo; he said compactly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The driver appeared to be murmuring prayers very softly as he examined the
+      brake.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda was struggling with profound problems. &ldquo;Why didn't you drive down
+      in the first place?&rdquo; she asked. &ldquo;Without going back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The landlord annoyed me,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And why didn't you let HIM drive?&rdquo; She indicated the driver by a motion
+      of the head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was angry,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;I was angry at the whole thing.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see I think I did that because he might have jumped off if I hadn't
+      been up there to prevent him&mdash;I mean if we had had a smash. I didn't
+      want him to get out of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But you too&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see I was angry....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's been as good as a switchback,&rdquo; said Amanda after reflection. &ldquo;But
+      weren't you a little careless about me, Cheetah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never thought of you,&rdquo; said Benham, and then as if he felt that
+      inadequate: &ldquo;You see&mdash;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&mdash;as those brutes up there live it. I want to clear
+      out the whole hot, dirty, little aimless nest of them....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, I'm sure,&rdquo; he repeated after a pause as though he had been digesting
+      something &ldquo;I wasn't thinking about you at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash; 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&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;wrought of clean fire, but her
+      sister?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;they seemed a very girlish lot
+      of girls; and an Amanda who was very knowing&mdash;knowing was the only
+      word for it&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were so many Amandas, they were as innumerable as the Venuses&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;and that Amanda came back to him no more.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda too was making her observations and discoveries.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;We can do this sort of thing all right,&rdquo; said Amanda
+      and Benham. &ldquo;But we mustn't lose the way again.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In Scutari,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;we will get an extra horse and a tent.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The way presently became a lake and they reached Scutari by boat towards
+      the dawn of the next day....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;BUONA NOTTE,&rdquo;
+       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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The singer had taken up his position at their feet and faced them. It was
+      a compliment.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;OH!&rdquo; said Amanda, rolling over.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But this does not give a full account of the animation of the khan. &ldquo;OH!&rdquo;
+       said Amanda, rolling over again with the suddenness of accumulated anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They're worse than in Scutari,&rdquo; said Benham, understanding her trouble
+      instantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It isn't days and nights we are having,&rdquo; said Benham a few days later,
+      &ldquo;it's days and nightmares.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;Sometimes they will wait for you at a ford or a broken bridge,&rdquo;
+       he said. &ldquo;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?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just a revolver,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was after that that he closed with Giorgio.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Near his feet was an ashen glow that gave no light.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His first perplexity gave way to dismay at finding no Amanda by his side.
+      &ldquo;Amanda!&rdquo; he cried....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice floated down through a chink in the floor above. &ldquo;What can it
+      be, Cheetah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then: &ldquo;It's coming nearer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;CHE E?&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Giorgio!&rdquo; he called.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The cavasse made an arresting gesture and followed discreetly and
+      noiselessly after the others, leaving Benham alone in the dark.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Had they gone out? Were they standing at the door looking out into the
+      night and listening?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda had found the chink and her voice sounded nearer.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a woman,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;RAIN!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then slowly and stumbling up the ladder the men began to return to
+      Benham's room.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ask them what it is,&rdquo; urged Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;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?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here we are,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Two?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That little crowd in the square at Scutari&mdash; That was a murder. I
+      didn't tell you at the time.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I knew it was,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They sing,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Benham and reflected, &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Sussex labourers don't sing,&rdquo; said Amanda. &ldquo;These people sing well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The man with the gold inlaid pistols and the diamonds on his yataghan. He
+      wanted to show them to us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. You let him see you admired him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I liked the things on his stall.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, he has killed nearly thirty people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;In duels?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does nobody kill him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to,&rdquo; said Benham and became thoughtful for a time. &ldquo;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&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But doesn't a blood feud come down on him?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But doesn't the law&mdash;?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's no law. Only custom and the Turkish tax collector.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They fight for freedom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But no one has ever conquered these people.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He slipped off the parapet, too impatient to sit any longer, and began to
+      pace up and down in the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;who
+      have the light&mdash;WANDERING! Just wandering!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He shrugged his shoulders and came to stare at the torrent under the
+      bridge.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're getting ripe for London, Cheetah,&rdquo; said Amanda softly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want somehow to get to work, to get my hands on definite things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can we get back?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She had to repeat her question presently.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But before they reached the world of their own times Macedonia was to show
+      them something grimmer than Albania.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were riding through a sunlit walnut wood beyond Ochrida when they
+      came upon the thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham caught Amanda's bridle so that she had to give her attention to her
+      steed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Ahead!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;Ahead! Look, a village!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (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.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through the trees now they could see houses. He quickened his pace and
+      jerked Amanda's horse forward....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the village was a still one. Not a dog barked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Here was an incredible village without even a dog!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; cried Amanda, with her voice going up. &ldquo;They've been killed.
+      Some one has killed them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham halted beside her and stared stupidly. &ldquo;It's a band,&rdquo; he said.
+      &ldquo;It's&mdash;propaganda. Greeks or Turks or Bulgarians.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But their feet and hands are fastened! And&mdash;... WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN
+      DOING TO THEM?...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to kill,&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;Oh! I want to kill people. Come on,
+      Amanda! It blisters one's eyes. Come away. Come away! Come!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her face was white and her eyes terror-stricken. She obeyed him
+      mechanically. She gave one last look at those bodies....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Down the deep-rutted soil of the village street they clattered. They came
+      to houses that had been set on fire....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is that hanging from a tree?&rdquo; cried Amanda. &ldquo;Oh, oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Come on....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Behind them rode the others scared and hurrying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then Giorgio and the others came clattering to overtake them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Giorgio was too full to wait for questions. He talked eagerly to Benham's
+      silence.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It must have happened yesterday, he explained. They were Bulgarians&mdash;traitors.
+      They had been converted to the Patriarchists by the Greeks&mdash;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Flies,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;in the sunlight!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent for a time and then he repeated the same words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then suddenly he began to declaim. &ldquo;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!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Grip the savage by the throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      To Amanda it sounded like delirium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;CHEETAH!&rdquo; she said suddenly between remonstrance and a cry of terror.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The darkness suddenly became quite still. He did not move.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She was afraid. &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she said again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it, Amanda?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I thought&mdash;. Are you all right?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Quite.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do you feel well?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've got this cold I caught in Ochrida. I suppose I'm feverish. But&mdash;yes,
+      I'm well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were talking.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Silence for a time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was thinking,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You talked.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm sorry,&rdquo; he said after another long pause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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. &ldquo;In Monastir there will be a doctor,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;Monastir is a big
+      place. In Monastir I will see a doctor. I want a doctor.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When you get to Monastir, young man,&rdquo; she told him, inaudibly, &ldquo;you will
+      go straight to bed and we'll see what has to be done with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;AMMALATO,&rdquo; said Giorgio confidentially, coming abreast of her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MEDICO IN MONASTIR,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SI,&mdash;MOLTI MEDICI, MONASTIR,&rdquo; Giorgio agreed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The goatherd, reclining under the shadow of a rock, awaited Benham's
+      embarrassment with an indolent malice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You UNCIVILIZED Beasts!&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;BANG!&rdquo; came a flight of lead within a yard
+      of Benham, and then the goatherd was in retreat behind a rock and Giorgio
+      was shouting &ldquo;AVANTI, AVANTI!&rdquo; to Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am tired of dogs,&rdquo; Benham said. &ldquo;Tired to death of dogs. All savage
+      dogs must be shot. All through the world. I am tired&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Dogs must be shot,&rdquo; said Benham, exalted. &ldquo;Dogs must be shot.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless they are GOOD dogs,&rdquo; said Amanda, keeping beside him with an eye
+      on his revolver.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Unless they are good dogs to every one,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's ghastly face was now bedewed with sweat and he swayed in his
+      saddle as he rode. &ldquo;This is NOT civilization, Amanda,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this is
+      NOT civilization.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then suddenly with extraordinary pathos:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! I want to go to BED! I want to go to BED! A bed with sheets....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      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&mdash;quite a civilized hotel....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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 &ldquo;theser&rdquo; and THOSE was
+      pronounced &ldquo;thoser,&rdquo; 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, &ldquo;May, Ah! Slays,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned over the pages and pointed to a word. &ldquo;May! Ah! Slays!&rdquo; he
+      repeated, reproachfully, almost bitterly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, MEASLES!&rdquo; cried Amanda....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So the spirited honeymoon passed its zenith.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's plans were comprehensive but entirely vague; Amanda had not so
+      much plans as intentions....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0005" id="link2HCH0005">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE FIFTH ~~ THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      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
+      &ldquo;Sex,&rdquo; 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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      At that the autobiography stopped short, and the intercalary note began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This intercalary note ran as follows:
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;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.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The writing changed at this point.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;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&mdash;so many things that no common
+      Man of Spirit will resign. Its intention transcends these things. Over all
+      the world it would maintain justice, order, a noble peace, and it would do
+      this without indignation, without resentment, without mawkish tenderness
+      or individualized enthusiasm or any queen of beauty. It is of a cold
+      austere quality, commanding sometimes admiration but having small hold
+      upon the affections of men. So that it is among its foremost distinctions
+      that its heart is steeled....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      There this odd fragment ended and White was left to resume the interrupted
+      autobiography.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What moods, what passions, what nights of despair and gathering storms of
+      anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are buried and
+      hidden and implied in every love story! What a waste is there of exquisite
+      things! So each spring sees a million glorious beginnings, a sunlit heaven
+      in every opening leaf, warm perfection in every stirring egg, hope and
+      fear and beauty beyond computation in every forest tree; and in the autumn
+      before the snows come they have all gone, of all that incalculable
+      abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure, excitement and
+      deliciousness, there is scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a
+      dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould or a rotting feather....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White held the ten or twelve pencilled pages that told how Benham and
+      Amanda drifted into antagonism and estrangement and as he held it he
+      thought of the laughter and delight they must have had together, the
+      exquisite excitements of her eye, the racing colour of her cheek, the
+      gleams of light upon her skin, the flashes of wit between them, the sense
+      of discovery, the high rare paths they had followed, the pools in which
+      they had swum together. And now it was all gone into nothingness, there
+      was nothing left of it, nothing at all, but just those sheets of
+      statement, and it may be, stored away in one single mind, like things
+      forgotten in an attic, a few neglected faded memories....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And even those few sheets of statement were more than most love leaves
+      behind it. For a time White would not read them. They lay neglected on his
+      knee as he sat back in Benham's most comfortable chair and enjoyed an
+      entirely beautiful melancholy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White too had seen and mourned the spring.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Indeed, poor dear! he had seen and mourned several springs....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      With a sigh he took up the manuscript and read Benham's desiccated story
+      of intellectual estrangement, and how in the end he had decided to leave
+      his wife and go out alone upon that journey of inquiry he had been
+      planning when first he met her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda had come back to England in a state of extravagantly vigorous
+      womanhood. Benham's illness, though it lasted only two or three weeks,
+      gave her a sense of power and leadership for which she had been struggling
+      instinctively ever since they came together. For a time at Locarno he was
+      lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she formed her bright and
+      limited plans for London. Benham had no plans as yet but only a sense of
+      divergence, as though he was being pulled in opposite directions by two
+      irresistible forces. To her it was plain that he needed occupation, some
+      distinguished occupation, and she could imagine nothing better for him
+      than a political career. She perceived he had personality, that he stood
+      out among men so that his very silences were effective. She loved him
+      immensely, and she had tremendous ambitions for him and through him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with appetite. Her
+      soul thirsted for London. It was like some enormous juicy fruit waiting
+      for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large enough to give her
+      avidity the sense of enough. She felt it waiting for her, household,
+      servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly delight of buying and possessing
+      things, the opera, first-nights, picture exhibitions, great
+      dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties, crowds seen from a point of
+      vantage, the carriage in a long string of fine carriages with the lamplit
+      multitude peering, Amanda in a thousand bright settings, in a thousand
+      various dresses. She had had love; it had been glorious, it was still
+      glorious, but her love-making became now at times almost perfunctory in
+      the contemplation of these approaching delights and splendours and
+      excitements.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in Benham's head; but she was a
+      realist. She did not see why ideas should stand in the way of a career.
+      Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind. One talks ideas, but
+      THE THING THAT IS, IS THE THING THAT IS. And though she believed that
+      Benham had a certain strength of character of his own, she had that sort
+      of confidence in his love for her and in the power of her endearments that
+      has in it the assurance of a faint contempt. She had mingled pride and
+      sense in the glorious realization of the power over him that her wit and
+      beauty gave her. She had held him faint with her divinity, intoxicated
+      with the pride of her complete possession, and she did not dream that the
+      moment when he should see clearly that she could deliberately use these
+      ultimate delights to rule and influence him, would be the end of their
+      splendour and her power. Her nature, which was just a nest of vigorous
+      appetites, was incapable of suspecting his gathering disillusionment until
+      it burst upon her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Now with her attention set upon London ahead he could observe her. In the
+      beginning he had never seemed to be observing her at all, they dazzled one
+      another; it seemed extraordinary now to him to note how much he had been
+      able to disregard. There were countless times still when he would have
+      dropped his observation and resumed that mutual exaltation very gladly,
+      but always now other things possessed her mind....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was still an immense pleasure for him in her vigour; there was
+      something delightful in her pounce, even when she was pouncing on things
+      superficial, vulgar or destructive. She made him understand and share the
+      excitement of a big night at the opera, the glitter and prettiness of a
+      smart restaurant, the clustering little acute adventures of a great
+      reception of gay people, just as she had already made him understand and
+      sympathize with dogs. She picked up the art world where he had laid it
+      down, and she forced him to feel dense and slow before he rebelled against
+      her multitudinous enthusiasms and admirations. South Harting had had its
+      little group of artistic people; it is not one of your sleepy villages,
+      and she slipped back at once into the movement. Those were the great days
+      of John, the days before the Post Impressionist outbreak. John, Orpen,
+      Tonks, she bought them with vigour. Artistic circles began to revolve
+      about her. Very rapidly she was in possession.... And among other
+      desirable things she had, it seemed, pounced upon and captured Lady
+      Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At any rate it was clear that that awful hostile silence and aloofness was
+      to end. Benham never quite mastered how it was done. But Amanda had gone
+      in one morning to Desborough Street, very sweetly and chastely dressed,
+      had abased herself and announced a possible (though subsequently
+      disproved) grandchild. And she had appreciated the little lady so highly
+      and openly, she had so instantly caught and reproduced her tone, that her
+      success, though only temporary in its completeness, was immediate. In the
+      afternoon Benham was amazed by the apparition of his mother amidst the
+      scattered unsettled furnishings of the new home Amanda had chosen in
+      Lancaster Gate. He was in the hall, the door stood open awaiting
+      packing-cases from a van without. In the open doorway she shone, looking
+      the smallest of dainty things. There was no effect of her coming but only
+      of her having arrived there, as a little blue butterfly will suddenly
+      alight on a flower.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, Poff!&rdquo; said Lady Marayne, ignoring abysses, &ldquo;What are you up to
+      now, Poff? Come and embrace me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, not so,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;stiffest of sons....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid hold of his ears in the old fashion and kissed one eye.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Congratulations, dear little Poff. Oh! congratulations! In heaps. I'm so
+      GLAD.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now what was that for?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then Amanda came out upon the landing upstairs, saw the encounter with
+      an involuntary cry of joy, and came downstairs with arms wide open. It was
+      the first intimation he had of their previous meeting. He was for some
+      minutes a stunned, entirely inadequate Benham....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a few people in the
+      Hampstead Garden suburb that she had not the slightest wish to know, and
+      then very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of people. The artistic
+      circle brought in people, Lady Marayne brought in people; they spread. It
+      was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young couple; he would
+      certainly do something considerable presently, and she was bright and
+      daring, jolly to look at and excellent fun, and, when you came to talk to
+      her, astonishingly well informed. They passed from one hostess's hand to
+      another: they reciprocated. The Clynes people and the Rushtones took her
+      up; Mr. Evesham was amused by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed her
+      charm like a trumpet, the Young Liberal people made jealous advances, Lord
+      Moggeridge found she listened well, she lit one of the brightest weekend
+      parties Lady Marayne had ever gathered at Chexington. And her descriptions
+      of recent danger and adventure in Albania not only entertained her hearers
+      but gave her just that flavour of personal courage which completes the
+      fascination of a young woman. People in the gaps of a halting dinner-table
+      conversation would ask: &ldquo;Have you met Mrs. Benham?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking. A smiling and successful young
+      woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl with a good
+      lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely engaged, or at least
+      friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, may be
+      forgiven if in the full tide of her success she does not altogether grasp
+      the intention of her husband's discourse. It seemed to her that he was
+      obsessed by a responsibility for civilization and the idea that he was
+      aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined to doubt whether he was justified
+      in calling himself aristocratic; at the best his mother was county-stuff;
+      but still if he did there was no great harm in it nowadays.) Clearly his
+      line was Tory-Democracy, social reform through the House of Lords and
+      friendly intimacy with the more spirited young peers. And it was only very
+      slowly and reluctantly that she was forced to abandon this satisfactory
+      solution of his problem. She reproduced all the equipment and comforts of
+      his Finacue Street study in their new home, she declared constantly that
+      she would rather forego any old social thing than interfere with his work,
+      she never made him go anywhere with her without first asking if his work
+      permitted it. To relieve him of the burthen of such social attentions she
+      even made a fag or so. The making of fags out of manifestly stricken men,
+      the keeping of tamed and hopeless admirers, seemed to her to be the most
+      natural and reasonable of feminine privileges. They did their useful
+      little services until it pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own. That
+      was how she put it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
+      ignored. He was manifestly losing his temper with her. There was a novel
+      austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face on certain
+      occasions that lingered in her memory.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was indeed making elaborate explanations. He said that what he wanted
+      to do was to understand &ldquo;the collective life of the world,&rdquo; and that this
+      was not to be done in a West-End study. He had an extraordinary contempt,
+      it seemed, for both sides in the drama of British politics. He had
+      extravagant ideas of beginning in some much more fundamental way. He
+      wanted to understand this &ldquo;collective life of the world,&rdquo; because
+      ultimately he wanted to help control it. (Was there ever such nonsense?)
+      The practical side of this was serious enough, however; he was back at his
+      old idea of going round the earth. Later on that might be rather a jolly
+      thing to do, but not until they had struck root a little more surely in
+      London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she began to
+      realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon this vague
+      extravagant research, that all this work she had been doing to make a
+      social place for him in London was as nothing to him, that he was thinking
+      of himself as separable from her....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Cheetah! How can you leave your spotless leopard? You would howl in
+      the lonely jungle!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Possibly I shall. But I am going.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then I shall come.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No.&rdquo; He considered her reasons. &ldquo;You see you are not interested.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I am.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not as I am. You would turn it all into a jolly holiday. You don't want
+      to see things as I want to do. You want romance. All the world is a show
+      for you. As a show I can't endure it. I want to lay hands on it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Cheetah!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;this is separation.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You will have your life here. And I shall come back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Cheetah! How can we be separated?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We are separated,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes became round with astonishment. Then her face puckered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she cried in a voice of soft distress, &ldquo;I love you. What do you
+      mean?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and
+      shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Don't say we are separated,&rdquo; she whispered, putting her still wet face
+      close to his.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. We're mates,&rdquo; he answered softly, with his arm about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How could we ever keep away from each uvver?&rdquo; she whispered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was silent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How COULD we?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He answered aloud. &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I mean to go round the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is to become of me,&rdquo; she asked suddenly in a voice of despair,
+      &ldquo;while you go round the world? If you desert me in London,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;if
+      you shame me by deserting me in London&mdash; If you leave me, I will
+      never forgive you, Cheetah! Never.&rdquo; Then in an almost breathless voice,
+      and as if she spoke to herself, &ldquo;Never in all my days.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children. There was
+      nothing involuntary about Amanda. &ldquo;Soon,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;we must begin to
+      think of children. Not just now, but a little later. It's good to travel
+      and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are children in the
+      background. No woman is really content until she is a mother....&rdquo; And for
+      nearly a fortnight nothing more was said about that solitary journey round
+      the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk. She set herself
+      with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there were other men
+      in the world. The convenient fags, sometimes a little embarrassed, found
+      their inobtrusive services being brought into the light before Benham's
+      eyes. Most of them were much older men than himself, elderly philanderers
+      of whom it seemed to him no sane man need be jealous, men often of forty
+      or more, but one was a contemporary, Sir Philip Easton, a man with a touch
+      of Spanish blood and a suggestion of Spanish fire, who quite manifestly
+      was very much in love with Amanda and of whom she spoke with a slight
+      perceptible difference of manner that made Benham faintly uneasy. He was
+      ashamed of the feeling. Easton it seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine
+      honour, so that Amanda could trust herself with him to an extent that
+      would have been inadvisable with men of a commoner substance, and he had a
+      gift of understanding and sympathy that was almost feminine; he could
+      cheer one up when one was lonely and despondent. For Amanda was so
+      methodical in the arrangement of her time that even in the full rush of a
+      London season she could find an hour now and then for being lonely and
+      despondent. And he was a liberal and understanding purchaser of the
+      ascendant painters; he understood that side of Amanda's interests, a side
+      upon which Benham was notably deficient....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?&mdash;Sir
+      Philip Easton?&rdquo; said Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said
+      nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her,&rdquo; said Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Benham after consideration. &ldquo;I don't intend to be a wife-herd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wife-herd&mdash;same as goat-herd.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff&mdash;nowadays.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's exactly what I mean. I can understand the kind of curator's interest
+      an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but to spend my
+      days looking after one person who ought to be able to look after herself&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's very young.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's quite grown up. Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you leave her about and go abroad&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Has she been talking to you, mother?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The thing shows.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But about my going abroad?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She said something, my little Poff.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference was
+      something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking inordinately.
+      He weighed his words before he spoke again. &ldquo;If Amanda chooses to threaten
+      me with a sort of conditional infidelity, I don't see that it ought to
+      change the plans I have made for my life....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No aristocrat has any right to be jealous,&rdquo; Benham wrote. &ldquo;If he chances
+      to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or naturally go his
+      way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel her to go his way.
+      What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion through morasses of
+      uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the use of dragging even a
+      willing pretender, who has no inherent will to seek and live the
+      aristocratic life?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
+      Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of her, the
+      sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly
+      resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of thinking her over had
+      gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been preoccupied
+      with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a sense of
+      extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her, of being
+      unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone conclusions.
+      He was ready now even with the details of his project. She should go on
+      with her life in London exactly as she had planned it. He would take
+      fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might spend
+      without check or stint as it pleased her. He was going round the world for
+      one or two years. It was even possible he would not go alone. There was a
+      man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don called Prothero
+      who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out his ideas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should
+      happen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily told
+      her that this only hardened his heart. She perceived that she must make a
+      softer appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive and imitate the
+      spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the first time
+      clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to bear a child.
+      &ldquo;He cannot go if I am going to have a child,&rdquo; she told herself. But that
+      would mean illness, and for illness in herself or others Amanda had the
+      intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet even illness would be better
+      than this intolerable publication of her husband's ability to leave her
+      side....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith
+      to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him. Her
+      dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I want to have children, but I must go round the world
+      none the less.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind. She
+      argued with persistence and repetition. And then suddenly so that she was
+      astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and she
+      was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-forgetful; she
+      was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale green, that set off her
+      slim erect body and the strong clear lines of her neck and shoulders very
+      beautifully, some greenish stones caught a light from without and flashed
+      soft whispering gleams from amidst the misty darkness of her hair. She was
+      going to Lady Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for a dinner at the
+      House with some young Liberals at which he was to meet two representative
+      Indians with a grievance from Bengal. Husband and wife had but a few
+      moments together. She asked about his company and he told her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They will tell you about India.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood for a moment looking out across the lights and the dark green
+      trees, and then she turned to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why cannot I come with you?&rdquo; she asked with sudden passion. &ldquo;Why cannot I
+      see the things you want to see?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you you are not interested. You would only be interested through
+      me. That would not help me. I should just be dealing out my premature
+      ideas to you. If you cared as I care, if you wanted to know as I want to
+      know, it would be different. But you don't. It isn't your fault that you
+      don't. It happens so. And there is no good in forced interest, in
+      prescribed discovery.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah,&rdquo; she asked, &ldquo;what is it that you want to know&mdash;that I don't
+      care for?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to know about the world. I want to rule the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So do I.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, you want to have the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Isn't it the same?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. You're a greedier thing than I am, you Black Leopard you&mdash;standing
+      there in the dusk. You're a stronger thing. Don't you know you're
+      stronger? When I am with you, you carry your point, because you are more
+      concentrated, more definite, less scrupulous. When you run beside me you
+      push me out of my path.... You've made me afraid of you.... And so I won't
+      go with you, Leopard. I go alone. It isn't because I don't love you. I
+      love you too well. It isn't because you aren't beautiful and
+      wonderful....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for this that you want than you
+      care for me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham thought of it. &ldquo;I suppose I do,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is it that you want? Still I don't understand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice had the break of one who would keep reasonable in spite of pain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to tell you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, you ought to tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wonder if I can tell you,&rdquo; he said very thoughtfully, and rested his
+      hands on his hips. &ldquo;I shall seem ridiculous to you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You ought to tell me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think what I want is to be king of the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood quite still staring at him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do not know how I can tell you of it. Amanda, do you remember those
+      bodies&mdash;you saw those bodies&mdash;those mutilated men?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I saw them,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well. Is it nothing to you that those things happen?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They must happen.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No. They happen because there are no kings but pitiful kings. They happen
+      because the kings love their Amandas and do not care.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But what can YOU do, Cheetah?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very little. But I can give my life and all my strength. I can give all I
+      can give.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how? How can you help it&mdash;help things like that massacre?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong with my world and rule it
+      and set it right.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;YOU! Alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Other men do as much. Every one who does so helps others to do so. You
+      see&mdash;... In this world one may wake in the night and one may resolve
+      to be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king. Does that sound
+      foolishness to you? Anyhow, it's fair that I should tell you, though you
+      count me a fool. This&mdash;this kingship&mdash;this dream of the night&mdash;is
+      my life. It is the very core of me. Much more than you are. More than
+      anything else can be. I mean to be a king in this earth. KING. I'm not
+      mad.... I see the world staggering from misery to misery and there is
+      little wisdom, less rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things
+      come by chance and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my
+      world and I am responsible. Every man to whom this light has come is
+      responsible. As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your kingship
+      is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no delight, except in
+      work, in service, in utmost effort. As far as I can do it I will rule my
+      world. I cannot abide in this smug city, I cannot endure its
+      self-complacency, its routine, its gloss of success, its rottenness.... I
+      shall do little, perhaps I shall do nothing, but what I can understand and
+      what I can do I will do. Think of that wild beautiful country we saw, and
+      the mean misery, the filth and the warring cruelty of the life that lives
+      there, tragedy, tragedy without dignity; and think, too, of the limitless
+      ugliness here, and of Russia slipping from disorder to massacre, and
+      China, that sea of human beings, sliding steadily to disaster. Do you
+      think these are only things in the newspapers? To me at any rate they are
+      not things in newspapers; they are pain and failure, they are torment,
+      they are blood and dust and misery. They haunt me day and night. Even if
+      it is utterly absurd I will still do my utmost. It IS absurd. I'm a madman
+      and you and my mother are sensible people.... And I will go my way.... I
+      don't care for the absurdity. I don't care a rap.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There you have it, Amanda. It's rant, perhaps. Sometimes I feel it's
+      rant. And yet it's the breath of life to me.... There you are.... At last
+      I've been able to break silence and tell you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped with something like a sob and stood regarding the dusky mystery
+      of her face. She stood quite still, she was just a beautiful outline in
+      the twilight, her face was an indistinctness under the black shadow of her
+      hair, with eyes that were two patches of darkness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the time. His
+      voice changed. &ldquo;Well&mdash;if you provoke a man enough, you see he makes
+      speeches. Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda. Here we are talking instead
+      of going to our dinners. The car has been waiting ten minutes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly. In an instant she had
+      ceased to plot against him. A vast wave of emotion swept her forward to a
+      resolution that astonished her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed, &ldquo;give
+      me one thing. Stay until June with me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Because&mdash;now&mdash;no, I don't want to keep you any more&mdash;I am
+      not trying to hold you any more.... I want....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah,&rdquo; she whispered almost inaudibly, &ldquo;Cheetah&mdash;I didn't
+      understand. But now&mdash;. I want to bear your child.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was astonished. &ldquo;Old Leopard!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing very
+      close to him, &ldquo;Queen&mdash;-if I can be&mdash;to your King.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You want to bear me a child!&rdquo; he whispered, profoundly moved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of Commons
+      came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer. And over against Amanda
+      at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of those men who know that
+      their judgments are quoted.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?&rdquo; he asked of his
+      neighbour in confidential undertones....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He tittered. &ldquo;I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY aware
+      that the man to her left is talking to her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was now a
+      fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in some
+      way Prothero was necessary to his mind. It was as if he looked to Prothero
+      to keep him real. He suspected even while he obeyed that upward flourish
+      which was his own essential characteristic. He had a peculiar feeling that
+      somehow that upward bias would betray him; that from exaltation he might
+      presently float off, into the higher, the better, and so to complete
+      unreality. He fled from priggishness and the terror of such sublimity
+      alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation to so many things Prothero in a
+      peculiar distinctive manner SAW. He had less self-control than Benham,
+      less integrity of purpose, less concentration, and things that were before
+      his eyes were by the very virtue of these defects invariably visible to
+      him. Things were able to insist upon themselves with him. Benham, on the
+      other hand, when facts contradicted his purpose too stoutly, had a way of
+      becoming blind to them. He repudiated inconvenient facts. He mastered and
+      made his world; Prothero accepted and recorded his. Benham was a will
+      towards the universe where Prothero was a perception and Amanda a
+      confusing responsive activity. And it was because of his realization of
+      this profound difference between them that he was possessed by the idea of
+      taking Prothero with him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision&mdash;rather
+      like that eye the Graiae used to hand one another....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms in
+      Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue
+      sky, seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholarship pervaded them&mdash;a
+      little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not
+      completely forgotten. Prothero's door had been locked against the world,
+      and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only
+      apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better
+      part of a second. He might have been asleep, he might have been doing
+      anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men
+      exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before
+      Benham' s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host to
+      the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects of
+      the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the
+      distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red,
+      incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an air of
+      having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE, its cover proclaimed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His host followed that glance and blushed. &ldquo;They send me all sorts of
+      inappropriate stuff to review,&rdquo; he remarked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he was denouncing celibacy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The transition wasn't very clear to Benham. His mind had been preoccupied
+      by the problem of how to open his own large project. Meanwhile Prothero
+      got, as it were, the conversational bit between his teeth and bolted. He
+      began to say the most shocking things right away, so that Benham's
+      attention was caught in spite of himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Inflammatory classics.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What's that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;I can't stand
+      it any longer.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world, such
+      a statement might have been credible. Even in his own life,&mdash;it was
+      now indeed a remote, forgotten stage&mdash;there had been something
+      distantly akin....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You're going to marry?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Who's the lady, Billy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know. Venus.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly. &ldquo;So far as I know, it
+      is Venus Anadyomene.&rdquo; A flash of laughter passed across his face and left
+      it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. &ldquo;I like her best,
+      anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! I feel that almost any of them&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Tut, tut!&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face? I am
+      not pronouncing an immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. I am
+      telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I feel. I want&mdash;Venus. I
+      don't want her to talk to or anything of that sort.... I have been
+      studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning,
+      instead of doing any work. Would you like to see it?... NO!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad. It is a peculiarly
+      erotic spring. I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend to
+      ordinary conversation. These feelings, I understand, are by no means
+      peculiar to myself.... No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now
+      that the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in you said, 'How are
+      you?' I am telling you how I am. You brought it on yourself. Well&mdash;I
+      am&mdash;inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious convictions to
+      assist me either to endure or deny this&mdash;this urgency. And so why
+      should I deny it? It's one of our chief problems here. The majority of my
+      fellow dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and
+      combination-room are in just the same case as myself. The fever in oneself
+      detects the fever in others. I know their hidden thoughts. Their fishy
+      eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts. Each covers his miserable
+      secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference. A tattered
+      cloak.... Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible vice of
+      continence&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy, what's the matter with you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero grimaced impatience. &ldquo;Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a humbug,
+      Benham?&rdquo; he screamed, and in screaming became calmer. &ldquo;Nature taunts me,
+      maddens me. My life is becoming a hell of shame. 'Get out from all these
+      books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.' The Flesh, Benham. Yes&mdash;I
+      insist&mdash;the Flesh. Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any man a pure
+      spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage, with too much
+      port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked Aspasia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mutual, perhaps, Billy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh! you can sneer!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, clearly&mdash;Saint Paul is my authority&mdash;it's marriage,
+      Billy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero had walked to the window. He turned round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I CAN'T marry,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;The trouble has gone too far. I've lost my
+      nerve in the presence of women. I don't like them any more. They come at
+      one&mdash;done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about all
+      sorts of things that don't matter....&rdquo; He surveyed his friend's thoughtful
+      attitude. &ldquo;I'm getting to hate women, Benham. I'm beginning now to
+      understand the bitterness of spinsters against men. I'm beginning to grasp
+      the unkindliness of priests. The perpetual denial. To you, happily
+      married, a woman is just a human being. You can talk to her, like her, you
+      can even admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge against
+      her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat down abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy! this is delusion,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;What's come over you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm telling you,&rdquo; said Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero awaited some further utterance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm looking for the cause of it. It's feeding, Billy. It's port and
+      stimulants where there is no scope for action. It's idleness. I begin to
+      see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers. Look at that filing
+      system like an arsenal of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow not
+      idleness.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There's still bodily idleness. No. That's your trouble. You're stuffy.
+      You've enlarged your liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning after
+      an extravagant breakfast&mdash;. And peep and covet.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Just eggs and bacon!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. Come out of it, Billy, and
+      get aired.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can one?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's an infernally warm morning.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Walk with me to Grantchester.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We might go by boat. You could row.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WALK.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I ought to do these papers.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You weren't doing them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours is&mdash;horrid&mdash;and
+      just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come with me to Russia
+      and about the world. I'm going to leave my wife&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leave your wife!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead you
+      are in this disgusting state. I've never met anything in my life so hot
+      and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one talk to
+      you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You pull things down to your own level,&rdquo; said Benham as they went through
+      the heat to Grantchester.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I pull them down to truth,&rdquo; panted Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and discipline
+      and training some sort of falsity!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the
+      background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not talking of Love,&rdquo; he said, remaining persistently outrageous.
+      &ldquo;I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of arranging
+      systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is physically
+      possible....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why don't we up and find out?&rdquo; said Billy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that
+      surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came
+      to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our
+      indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with awe and
+      terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in particular
+      should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to traditional
+      suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? &ldquo;What is the wisdom of the ages?&rdquo;
+       said Prothero. &ldquo;Think of the corners where that wisdom was born....
+      Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise man with a
+      rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?&rdquo; protested Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter
+      experience. Most of it was better forgotten. It didn't convince. It had
+      never worked things out. In this matter just as in every other matter that
+      really signified things had still to be worked out. Nothing had been
+      worked out hitherto. The wisdom of the ages was a Cant. People had been
+      too busy quarrelling, fighting and running away. There wasn't any digested
+      experience of the ages at all. Only the mis-remembered hankey-pankey of
+      the Dead Old Man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or isn't
+      it?&rdquo; Prothero demanded. &ldquo;There's a simple question enough, and is there
+      anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages to tell me yes or
+      no? Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and vigorous as a mated man? Is
+      a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being? Can she be? I don't
+      believe so. Then why in thunder do we let her be? Here am I at a centre of
+      learning and wisdom and I don't believe so; and there is nothing in all
+      our colleges, libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here, to settle that
+      plain question for me, plainly and finally. My life is a grubby torment of
+      cravings because it isn't settled. If sexual activity IS a part of the
+      balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set about making it
+      accessible and harmless and have done with it. Swedish exercises. That
+      sort of thing. If it isn't, if it can be reduced and done without, then
+      let us set about teaching people HOW to control themselves and reduce and
+      get rid of this vehement passion. But all this muffled mystery, this
+      pompous sneak's way we take with it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But, Billy! How can one settle these things? It's a matter of
+      idiosyncrasy. What is true for one man isn't true for another. There's
+      infinite difference of temperaments!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral code for
+      each sort? Why am I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for Rigdon
+      the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like a glove? It isn't convenient
+      for me. It fits me like a hair-shirt. Of course there are temperaments,
+      but why can't we formulate them and exercise the elementary charity of
+      recognizing that one man's health in these matters is another man's death?
+      Some want love and gratification and some don't. There are people who want
+      children and people who don't want to be bothered by children but who are
+      full of vivid desires. There are people whose only happiness is chastity,
+      and women who would rather be courtesans than mothers. Some of us would
+      concentrate upon a single passion or a single idea; others overflow with a
+      miscellaneous&mdash;tenderness. Yes,&mdash;and you smile! Why spit upon
+      and insult a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin at it? Why try
+      every one by the standards that suit oneself? We're savages, Benham,
+      shamefaced savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was angry about sex by seventeen,&rdquo; he went on. &ldquo;Every year I live I
+      grow angrier.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Think,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex that is
+      going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these thousands
+      full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it together; we
+      work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and casual stories,
+      patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders, disease, trouble,
+      escapes; and the next generation will start, and the next generation after
+      that will start with nothing but your wisdom of the ages, which isn't
+      wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos and mystery and the
+      secretive cunning of the savage....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What I really want to do is my work,&rdquo; said Prothero, going off quite
+      unexpectedly again. &ldquo;That is why all this business, this incessant craving
+      and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There I'm with you,&rdquo; cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent of
+      Prothero's prepossessions. &ldquo;What we want to do is our work.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting the
+      word again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's this, that you call Work, that I call&mdash;what do I call it?&mdash;living
+      the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of this
+      business. If it was only submission.... YOU think it is only submission&mdash;giving
+      way.... It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all right, we'd be the
+      happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't know all the time that
+      there was something else to live for, something far more important. And
+      different. Absolutely different and contradictory. So different that it
+      cuts right across all these considerations. It won't fit in.... I don't
+      know what this other thing is; it's what I want to talk about with you.
+      But I know that it IS, in all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands
+      control, it demands continence, it insists upon disregard.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to
+      Prothero that day.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mankind,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates us.
+      It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent
+      necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as being
+      married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love story....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied,&rdquo; said Prothero,
+      sticking stoutly to his own view.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester
+      after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and recover
+      that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the imagination of
+      Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero's troubles as soar
+      over them. It is the last triumph of the human understanding to sympathize
+      with desires we do not share, and to Benham who now believed himself to be
+      loved beyond the chances of life, who was satisfied and tranquil and
+      austerely content, it was impossible that Prothero's demands should seem
+      anything more than the grotesque and squalid squealings of the beast that
+      has to be overridden and rejected altogether. It is a freakish fact of our
+      composition that these most intense feelings in life are just those that
+      are most rapidly and completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years,
+      but the magic of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our
+      lives and vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was
+      still not a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs.
+      Skelmersdale, and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a
+      swine in its sty....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at last he could
+      sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the project that
+      had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had discovered a new reason for travelling. The last country we can see
+      clearly, he had discovered, is our own country. It is as hard to see one's
+      own country as it is to see the back of one's head. It is too much behind
+      us, too much ourselves. But Russia is like England with everything larger,
+      more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked about St.
+      Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage untamed London
+      on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal cities, like no other
+      capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings mingled in their effects.
+      Like London it looked over the heads of its own people to a limitless
+      polyglot empire. And Russia was an aristocratic land, with a middle-class
+      that had no pride in itself as a class; it had a British toughness and
+      incompetence, a British disregard of logic and meticulous care. Russia,
+      like England, was outside Catholic Christendom, it had a state church and
+      the opposition to that church was not secularism but dissent. One could
+      draw a score of such contrasted parallels. And now it was in a state of
+      intolerable stress, that laid bare the elemental facts of a great social
+      organization. It was having its South African war, its war at the other
+      end of the earth, with a certain defeat instead of a dubious victory....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in
+      England,&rdquo; said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham went on with his discourse about Russia....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the college of Troitzka,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;which I understand is a kind
+      of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me that
+      although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the
+      arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are
+      conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation. He
+      led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try to
+      grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty of
+      every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much. And so he was
+      going, and if Prothero cared to come too&mdash;
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;I should like to go to Russia.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      13
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was never able
+      to lift Prothero away from his obsession. It was the substance of their
+      talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting destroyers and winking
+      beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the smoothly undulating darkness
+      of the North Sea; it rose upon them again as they sat over the cakes and
+      cheese of a Dutch breakfast in the express for Berlin. Prothero filled the
+      Sieges Allee with his complaints against nature and society, and
+      distracted Benham in his contemplation of Polish agriculture from the
+      windows of the train with turgid sexual liberalism. So that Benham, during
+      this period until Prothero left him and until the tragic enormous
+      spectacle of Russia in revolution took complete possession of him, was as
+      it were thinking upon two floors. Upon the one he was thinking of the vast
+      problems of a society of a hundred million people staggering on the verge
+      of anarchy, and upon the other he was perplexed by the feverish
+      inattention of Prothero to the tremendous things that were going on all
+      about them. It was only presently when the serenity of his own private
+      life began to be ruffled by disillusionment, that he began to realize the
+      intimate connexion of these two systems of thought. Yet Prothero put it to
+      him plainly enough.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Inattentive,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;of course I am inattentive. What is really
+      the matter with all this&mdash;this social mess people are in here, is
+      that nearly everybody is inattentive. These Big Things of yours, nobody is
+      thinking of them really. Everybody is thinking about the Near Things that
+      concern himself.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The bombs they threw yesterday? The Cossacks and the whips?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nudges. Gestures of inattention. If everybody was thinking of the Res
+      Publica would there be any need for bombs?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He pursued his advantage. &ldquo;It's all nonsense to suppose people think of
+      politics because they are in 'em. As well suppose that the passengers on a
+      liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war. Before men can think of
+      to-morrow, they must think of to-day. Before they can think of others,
+      they must be sure about themselves. First of all, food; the private, the
+      personal economic worry. Am I safe for food? Then sex, and until one is
+      tranquil and not ashamed, not irritated and dissatisfied, how can one care
+      for other people, or for next year or the Order of the World? How can one,
+      Benham?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He seized the illustration at hand. &ldquo;Here we are in Warsaw&mdash;not a
+      month after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging. Windows have still to be
+      mended, smashed doors restored. There's blood-stains still on some of the
+      houses. There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and in the Ochrana
+      prison. This morning there were executions. Is it anything more than an
+      eddy in the real life of the place? Watch the customers in the shops, the
+      crowd in the streets, the men in the cafes who stare at the passing women.
+      They are all swallowed up again in their own business. They just looked up
+      as the Cossacks galloped past; they just shifted a bit when the bullets
+      spat....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing
+      adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide of the
+      private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him back to
+      Cambridge&mdash;changed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
+      disregard Prothero. He was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble of
+      Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the hurrying
+      darknesses of an approaching storm. In those days it looked as though it
+      must be an overwhelming storm. He was drinking in the wide and massive
+      Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the entangling streets, the houses
+      with their strange lettering in black and gold, the innumerable barbaric
+      churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the sombre red fortress of the
+      Kremlin, with its bulbous churches clustering up into the sky, the
+      crosses, the innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil,
+      carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of permissible caricature, and
+      in this setting the obscure drama of clustering, staring, sash-wearing
+      peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand varieties of
+      uniform, a running and galloping to and fro of messengers, a flutter of
+      little papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and portentous, a
+      gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on to a perpetual
+      clash and clamour of bells. Benham had brought letters of introduction to
+      a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed. They were &ldquo;away,&rdquo; the
+      porters said, and they continued to be &ldquo;away,&rdquo;&mdash;it was the formula,
+      he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few showed themselves
+      extraordinarily anxious to inform him about things, to explain themselves
+      and things about them exhaustively. One young student took him to various
+      meetings and showed him in great detail the scene of the recent murder of
+      the Grand Duke Sergius. The buildings opposite the old French cannons were
+      still under repair. &ldquo;The assassin stood just here. The bomb fell there,
+      look! right down there towards the gate; that was where they found his
+      arm. He was torn to fragments. He was scraped up. He was mixed with the
+      horses....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter of
+      days or at the utmost weeks. And whatever question Benham chose to ask
+      these talkers were prepared to answer. Except one. &ldquo;And after the
+      revolution,&rdquo; he asked, &ldquo;what then?...&rdquo; Then they waved their hands, and
+      failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous drift
+      towards a conflict. He was trying to piece together a process, if it was
+      one and the same process, which involved riots in Lodz, fighting at Libau,
+      wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal battlings in Manchuria, the
+      obscure movements of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in the Indian
+      seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was trying to rationalize it all
+      in his mind, to comprehend its direction. He was struggling strenuously
+      with the obscurities of the language in which these things were being
+      discussed about him, a most difficult language demanding new sets of
+      visual images because of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder that for a
+      time he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some entirely
+      disconnected affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre Square.
+      Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-looking men with
+      peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's friends and guides to
+      take him out and show him this and that. At first Prothero always
+      accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then he began to make excuses. He
+      would stay behind in the hotel. Then when Benham returned Prothero would
+      have disappeared. When the porter was questioned about Prothero his
+      nescience was profound.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who wanted
+      to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was alarmed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Moscow is a late place,&rdquo; said Benham's student friend. &ldquo;You need not be
+      anxious until after four or five in the morning. It will be quite time&mdash;QUITE
+      time to be anxious to-morrow. He may be&mdash;close at hand.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him
+      sleepy and irritable.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't trouble if YOU are late,&rdquo; said Prothero, sitting up in his bed
+      with a red resentful face and crumpled hair. &ldquo;I wasn't born yesterday.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to leave Moscow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Odessa&mdash;Odessa is the centre of interest just now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want to stay in Moscow.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham looked baffled.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon them.
+      &ldquo;I don't want to leave Moscow,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;and I'm not going to do so.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But haven't we done&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero interrupted. &ldquo;You may. But I haven't. We're not after the same
+      things. Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest me. I've found&mdash;different
+      things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His expression was extraordinarily defiant.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I want,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;to put our affairs on a different footing. Now
+      you've opened the matter we may as well go into it. You were good enough
+      to bring me here.... There was a sort of understanding we were working
+      together.... We aren't.... The long and short of it is, Benham, I want to
+      pay you for my journey here and go on my own&mdash;independently.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly
+      incredible in him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters
+      jerked back into Benham's memory. It popped back so suddenly that for an
+      instant he wanted to laugh. He turned towards the window, picked his way
+      among Prothero's carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment
+      staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing
+      fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS. Then he
+      turned.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;didn't I see you the other evening driving towards the
+      Hermitage?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Prothero, and added, &ldquo;that's it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You were with a lady.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And she IS a lady,&rdquo; said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face twitched
+      as though he was going to weep.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's a Russian?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She had an English mother. Oh, you needn't stand there and look so damned
+      ironical! She's&mdash;she's a woman. She's a thing of kindness....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was too full to go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy, old boy,&rdquo; said Benham, distressed, &ldquo;I don't want to be ironical&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero had got his voice again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You'd better know,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you'd better know. She's one of those women
+      who live in this hotel.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Live in this hotel!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;On the fourth floor. Didn't you know? It's the way in most of these big
+      Russian hotels. They come down and sit about after lunch and dinner. A
+      woman with a yellow ticket. Oh! I don't care. I don't care a rap. She's
+      been kind to me; she's&mdash;she's dear to me. How are you to understand?
+      I shall stop in Moscow. I shall take her to England. I can't live without
+      her, Benham. And then&mdash; And then you come worrying me to come to your
+      damned Odessa!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face as
+      though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an apoplectic
+      moment burst noisily into tears. They ran between his fingers. &ldquo;Get out of
+      my room,&rdquo; he shouted, suffocatingly. &ldquo;What business have you to come
+      prying on me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared round-eyed
+      at his friend. His hands were in his pockets. For a time he said nothing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he began at last, and stopped again. &ldquo;Billy, in this country
+      somehow one wants to talk like a Russian. Billy, my dear&mdash;I'm not
+      your father, I'm not your judge. I'm&mdash;unreasonably fond of you. It's
+      not my business to settle what is right or wrong for you. If you want to
+      stay in Moscow, stay in Moscow. Stay here, and stay as my guest....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't know,&rdquo; said Prothero brokenly; &ldquo;I didn't know it was possible to
+      get so fond of a person....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
+      abominable in his life before.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I'll make things all right here before
+      I go....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound thought to
+      his own room....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to explain
+      what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about the room trying
+      ways of putting it, while Benham packed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to have
+      shrunken to something sleek and small.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you could stay for a later train and have lunch and
+      meet her. She's not the ordinary thing. She's&mdash;different.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. &ldquo;Billy,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;no woman IS the
+      ordinary thing. They are all&mdash;different....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      14
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as disconnected
+      from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any matter to be. While
+      Benham went from Moscow and returned, and travelled hither and thither,
+      and involved himself more and more in the endless tangled threads of the
+      revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero was lost to all those large
+      issues in the development of his personal situation. He contributed
+      nothing to Benham's thought except attempts at discouragement. He
+      reiterated his declaration that all the vast stress and change of Russian
+      national life was going on because it was universally disregarded. &ldquo;I tell
+      you, as I told you before, that nobody is attending. You think because all
+      Moscow, all Russia, is in the picture, that everybody is concerned. Nobody
+      is concerned. Nobody cares what is happening. Even the men who write in
+      newspapers and talk at meetings about it don't care. They are thinking of
+      their dinners, of their clothes, of their money, of their wives. They
+      hurry home....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      That was his excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Manifestly it was an excuse.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy and
+      divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible. To Benham
+      in those days everything was very simple in this business of love. The
+      aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all. He had to love Amanda. He
+      and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in love, he felt, than
+      they had ever been before. They were now writing love-letters to each
+      other and enjoying a separation that was almost voluptuous. She found in
+      the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to him and to the natural fate
+      of women, a delightful exercise for her very considerable powers of
+      expression. Life pointed now wonderfully to the great time ahead when
+      there would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and meanwhile the Cheetah loped
+      about the wild world upon a mighty quest. In such terms she put it. Such
+      foolishness written in her invincibly square and youthful hand went daily
+      from London to Russia, and stacked up against his return in the porter's
+      office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or pursued him down through the jarring
+      disorders of south-west Russia, or waited for him at ill-chosen
+      post-offices that deflected his journeyings wastefully or in several
+      instances went altogether astray. Perhaps they supplied self-educating
+      young strikers in the postal service with useful exercises in the
+      deciphering of manuscript English. He wrote back five hundred different
+      ways of saying that he loved her extravagantly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and
+      solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world;
+      Heroic Love to its highest note&mdash;and then you go about your business.
+      It seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin high and diffuse
+      a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate multitudes who stewed in
+      affliction and hate because they had failed as yet to find this simple,
+      culminating elucidation. And Prothero&mdash;Prothero, too, was now
+      achieving the same grand elementariness, out of his lusts and protests and
+      general physical squalor he had flowered into love. For a time it is true
+      it made rather an ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere
+      goose-stepping for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay
+      exaltation. Benham had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this
+      Anglo-Russian, who was a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had
+      seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him,
+      and his impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with dusky
+      hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her, a quiet
+      alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda. And if she liked
+      old Prothero&mdash; And, indeed, she must like old Prothero or could she
+      possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero's soul would
+      wake up and face the world again. What did it matter what she had been?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained anxiety and
+      the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering towards revolution,
+      Benham went with his own love like a lamp within him and this affair of
+      Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was quite prepared for the most
+      sympathetic and liberal behaviour when he came back to Moscow to make the
+      lady's acquaintance. He intended to help Prothero to marry and take her
+      back to Cambridge, and to assist by every possible means in destroying and
+      forgetting the official yellow ticket that defined her status in Moscow.
+      But he reckoned without either Prothero or the young lady in this
+      expectation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations that there
+      were obscure obstacles to this manifest course. Prothero hesitated; the
+      lady expressed doubts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished. It was
+      chiefly a similarity of complexion. She had a more delicate face than
+      Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none of Amanda's
+      glow, and she spoke her mother's language with a pretty halting limp that
+      was very different from Amanda's clear decisions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She put her case compactly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would not DO in Cambridge,&rdquo; she said with an infinitesimal glance at
+      Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mr. Benham,&rdquo; she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman of
+      affairs, &ldquo;now do you see me in Cambridge? Now do you see me? Kept outside
+      the walls? In a little DATCHA? With no occupation? Just to amuse him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved still
+      completer lucidity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would come if I thought he wanted me to come,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;But you see
+      if I came he would not want me to come. Because then he would have me and
+      so he wouldn't want me. He would just have the trouble. And I am not sure
+      if I should be happy in Cambridge. I am not sure I should be happy enough
+      to make him happy. It is a very learned and intelligent and charming
+      society, of course; but here, THINGS HAPPEN. At Cambridge nothing happens&mdash;there
+      is only education. There is no revolution in Cambridge; there are not even
+      sinful people to be sorry for.... And he says himself that Cambridge
+      people are particular. He says they are liberal but very, very particular,
+      and perhaps I could not always act my part well. Sometimes I am not always
+      well behaved. When there is music I behave badly sometimes, or when I am
+      bored. He says the Cambridge people are so liberal that they do not mind
+      what you are, but he says they are so particular that they mind dreadfully
+      how you are what you are.... So that it comes to exactly the same
+      thing....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Anna Alexievna,&rdquo; said Benham suddenly, &ldquo;are you in love with Prothero?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her manner became conscientiously scientific.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is very kind and very generous&mdash;too generous. He keeps sending
+      for more money&mdash;hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Were you EVER in love?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course. But it's all gone long ago. It was like being hungry. Only
+      very fine hungry. Exquisite hungry.... And then being disgusted....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;He is in love with you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What is love?&rdquo; said Anna. &ldquo;He is grateful. He is by nature grateful.&rdquo; She
+      smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who looks down on her
+      bambino.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you love nothing?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I love Russia&mdash;and being alone, being completely alone. When I am
+      dead perhaps I shall be alone. Not even my own body will touch me then.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then she added, &ldquo;But I shall be sorry when he goes.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone. &ldquo;Your Anna,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is
+      rather wonderful. At first, I tell you now frankly I did not like her very
+      much, I thought she looked 'used,' she drank vodka at lunch, she was gay,
+      uneasily; she seemed a sham thing. All that was prejudice. She thinks;
+      she's generous, she's fine.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She's tragic,&rdquo; said Prothero as though it was the same thing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He spoke as though he noted an objection. His next remark confirmed this
+      impression. &ldquo;That's why I can't take her back to Cambridge,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, Benham,&rdquo; he went on, &ldquo;she's human. She's not really feminine. I
+      mean, she's&mdash;unsexed. She isn't fitted to be a wife or a mother any
+      more. We've talked about the possible life in England, very plainly. I've
+      explained what a household in Cambridge would mean.... It doesn't attract
+      her.... In a way she's been let out from womanhood, forced out of
+      womanhood, and I see now that when women are let out from womanhood
+      there's no putting them back. I could give a lecture on Anna. I see now
+      that if women are going to be wives and mothers and homekeepers and
+      ladies, they must be got ready for it from the beginning, sheltered, never
+      really let out into the wild chances of life. She has been. Bitterly.
+      She's REALLY emancipated. And it's let her out into a sort of nothingness.
+      She's no longer a woman, and she isn't a man. She ought to be able to go
+      on her own&mdash;like a man. But I can't take her back to Cambridge. Even
+      for her sake.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You won't be happy in Cambridge&mdash;alone,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, damnably not! But what can I do? I had at first some idea of coming
+      to Moscow for good&mdash;teaching.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He paused. &ldquo;Impossible. I'm worth nothing here. I couldn't have kept her.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what are you going to do, Billy?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't KNOW what I'm going to do, I tell you. I live for the moment.
+      To-morrow we are going out into the country.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't understand,&rdquo; said Benham with a gesture of resignation. &ldquo;It seems
+      to me that if a man and woman love each other&mdash;well, they insist upon
+      each other. What is to happen to her if you leave her in Moscow?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Damnation! Is there any need to ask that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Take her to Cambridge, man. And if Cambridge objects, teach Cambridge
+      better manners.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero's face was suddenly transfigured with rage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I tell you she won't come!&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Billy!&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;you should make her!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I don't love her like that,&rdquo; said Prothero, shrill with anger. &ldquo;I
+      tell you I don't love her like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he lunged into further deeps. &ldquo;It's the other men,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;it's
+      the things that have been. Don't you understand? Can't you understand? The
+      memories&mdash;she must have memories&mdash;they come between us. It's
+      something deeper than reason. It's in one's spine and under one's nails.
+      One could do anything, I perceive, for one's very own woman....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How could any man make her
+      his very own woman now? You&mdash;you don't seem to understand&mdash;ANYTHING.
+      She's nobody's woman&mdash;for ever. That&mdash;that might-have-been has
+      gone for ever.... It's nerves&mdash;a passion of the nerves. There's a
+      cruelty in life and&mdash; She's KIND to me. She's so kind to me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      15
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken fragments
+      in letters. When he looked for Anna Alexievna in December&mdash;he never
+      learnt her surname&mdash;he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar soon
+      after Prothero's departure and he could not find whither she had gone. He
+      never found her again. Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion. But
+      Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock to
+      Benham's ideas. It was clear he went off almost callously; it would seem
+      there was very little crying. Towards the end it was evident that the two
+      had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very end of all. It was almost
+      as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go. Then came regret,
+      a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with every mile of
+      distance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero. He had some hours
+      there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy
+      with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious
+      secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant
+      resemblance to Anna....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back.
+      &ldquo;But now I had the damned frontier,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;between us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the
+      &ldquo;damned frontier&rdquo; tip the balance against him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it seemed
+      as if Prothero had been transfigured. &ldquo;I can't stand this business,&rdquo; he
+      wrote. &ldquo;It has things in it, possibilities of emotional disturbance&mdash;you
+      can have no idea! In the train&mdash;luckily I was alone in the
+      compartment&mdash;I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it, I
+      was weeping&mdash;noisy weeping, an uproar! A beastly German came and
+      stood in the corridor to stare. I had to get out of the train. It is
+      disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you
+      about my dismal feelings....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but
+      to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable
+      regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of
+      his friend. Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris,&rdquo; he wrote. &ldquo;A levity. I
+      suspect the gypsum in the subsoil&mdash;some as yet undescribed
+      radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of those
+      tear-compelling German emanations....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And, Benham, I have found a friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A woman. Of course you will laugh, you will sneer. You do not understand
+      these things.... Yet they are so simple. It was the strangest accident
+      brought us together. There was something that drew us together. A sort of
+      instinct. Near the Boulevard Poissoniere....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good heavens!&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;A sort of instinct!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told her all about Anna!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good Lord!&rdquo; cried Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She understood. Perfectly. None of your so-called 'respectable' women
+      could have understood.... At first I intended merely to talk to her....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Little Anna Alexievna!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;you were too clean for him.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      16
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel
+      meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief,
+      to the grey mildness of Trinity. He saw him, capped and gowned, and
+      restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming
+      friendships.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts
+      and restrained celibates at the high tables. They ate on in their mature
+      wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled. Presently they would
+      withdraw processionally to the combination room....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There would be much to talk about over the wine.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He laughed abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space of
+      years. There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost in the
+      heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office. Perhaps to this day
+      they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in Kishinev or
+      Ekaterinoslav....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      17
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In November, after an adventure in the trader's quarter of Kieff which had
+      brought him within an inch of death, and because an emotional wave had
+      swept across him and across his correspondence with Amanda, Benham went
+      back suddenly to England and her. He wanted very greatly to see her and
+      also he wanted to make certain arrangements about his property. He
+      returned by way of Hungary, and sent telegrams like shouts of excitement
+      whenever the train stopped for a sufficient time. &ldquo;Old Leopard, I am
+      coming, I am coming,&rdquo; he telegraphed, announcing his coming for the fourth
+      time. It was to be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the mutual
+      refreshment of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to Russia
+      again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the utmost
+      dignity of expectant maternity. Like many other people he had been a
+      little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a common human
+      experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a rare and sacramental
+      function. Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey, dove-like
+      tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had given way to a soft glow of
+      the utmost loveliness, her brisk little neck that had always reminded him
+      of the stalk of a flower was now softened and rounded; her eyes were
+      tender, and she moved about the place in the manner of one who is vowed to
+      a great sacrifice. She dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a
+      certain astonishment in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony,
+      was the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her
+      daughter-in-law's unparalleled immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was
+      everywhere, and at his bedside he found&mdash;it had been put there for
+      him by Amanda&mdash;among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that
+      most wonderful of all philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the impending
+      fact. An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in
+      the depths of London society, but to make up for his absence Mrs. Morris
+      had taken a little cottage down by the river and the Wilder girls were
+      with her, both afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it seemed,
+      and more particularly Betty, prepared to be keenly critical of Benham's
+      attitude.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had returned
+      in a rather different vein of exaltation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments an
+      effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed. It was as if she
+      put aside for him something official, something sincerely maintained,
+      necessary, but at times a little irksome. It was as if she was glad to
+      take him into her confidence and unbend. Within the pre-natal Amanda an
+      impish Amanda still lingered.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must never
+      know....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most unpontifical
+      moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him home
+      across Europe. At times she was extraordinarily jolly. They had two or
+      three happy walks about the Chexington woods; that year the golden weather
+      of October had flowed over into November, and except for a carpet of green
+      and gold under the horse-chestnuts most of the leaves were still on the
+      trees. Gleams of her old wanton humour shone on him. And then would come
+      something else, something like a shadow across the world, something he had
+      quite forgotten since his idea of heroic love had flooded him, something
+      that reminded him of those long explanations with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders
+      that had never been explained, and of the curate in the doorway of the
+      cottage and his unaccountable tears.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little surprised to
+      find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into the garden, with an
+      accustomed familiarity. Sir Philip perceived him with a start that was
+      instantly controlled, and greeted him with unnatural ease.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket in the
+      neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending the summer,
+      the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from scholars and literary
+      men. A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought to have been aviating or
+      travelling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that there
+      was a flavour of established association in their manner. But then Sir
+      Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne. She called him &ldquo;Pip,&rdquo;
+       and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-court to him, &ldquo;Pip!&rdquo; And
+      then he called her &ldquo;Amanda.&rdquo; When the Wilder girls came up to join the
+      tennis he was just as brotherly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The next day he came to lunch.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been before of
+      the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes. They watched
+      him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that seemed at once pained
+      and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind of hard
+      brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably suspended,
+      that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon Sir Philip
+      would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up and go away
+      in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he could be spoken
+      to he contrived to speak to Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took advantage of
+      a pause to commit his little indiscretion.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Mrs. Benham,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;looks amazingly well&mdash;extraordinarily well,
+      don't you think?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes,&rdquo; said Benham, startled. &ldquo;Yes. She certainly keeps very well.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;She misses you terribly,&rdquo; said Sir Philip; &ldquo;it is a time when a woman
+      misses her husband. But, of course, she does not want to hamper your
+      work....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest in
+      these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no better
+      expression for this than a grunt.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't mind,&rdquo; said the young man with a slight catch in the breath
+      that might have been apprehensive, &ldquo;that I sometimes bring her books and
+      flowers and things? Do what little I can to keep life interesting down
+      here? It's not very congenial.... She's so wonderful&mdash;I think she is
+      the most wonderful woman in the world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was really
+      a primitive barbarian in these matters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I've no doubt,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;that my wife has every reason to be grateful
+      for your attentions.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir Philip was
+      engendering something still more personal. If so, he might be constrained
+      to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of chrysanthemums over Sir
+      Philip's head, or kick him in an improving manner. He had a ridiculous
+      belief that Sir Philip would probably take anything of the sort very
+      touchingly. He scrambled in his mind for some remark that would avert this
+      possibility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Have you ever been in Russia?&rdquo; he asked hastily. &ldquo;It is the most
+      wonderful country in Europe. I had an odd adventure near Kiev. During a
+      pogrom.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were presently
+      thrown out by Lady Marayne. They were so much more in the air....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      18
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had foreseen.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Easton has gone away,&rdquo; he remarked three days later to Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I told him to go. He is a bore with you about. But otherwise he is rather
+      a comfort, Cheetah.&rdquo; She meditated upon Sir Philip. &ldquo;And he's an
+      HONOURABLE man,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;He's safe....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      19
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in earnest.
+      The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic love for the modern
+      aristocrat ended abruptly. Instead there came the first draft for a study
+      of jealousy. The note was written in pencil on Chexington notepaper and
+      manifestly that had been supported on the ribbed cover of a book. There
+      was a little computation in the corner, converting forty-five degrees
+      Reaumur into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White guess it had been
+      written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it had been written in a rather
+      amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's journey to the gathering
+      revolt in Moscow....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual
+      jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible,
+      something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort to
+      be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so easily
+      settled with....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One likes to know.... Possibly one wants to know too much.... In phases
+      of fatigue, and particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one is
+      leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an irrational
+      torment....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of this
+      base motive. I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how strongly
+      jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with a man....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human being
+      being one's ownest own&mdash;utterly one's own....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One does....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There is something dishonouring in distrust&mdash;to both the distrusted
+      and the one who distrusts....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      20
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham did not see Amanda again until after the birth of their child. He
+      spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the fitful fighting
+      and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and taking care of a lost
+      and helpless English family whose father had gone astray temporarily on
+      the way home from Baku. Then he went southward to Rostov and thence to
+      Astrakhan. Here he really began his travels. He determined to get to India
+      by way of Herat and for the first time in his life rode out into an
+      altogether lawless wilderness. He went on obstinately because he found
+      himself disposed to funk the journey, and because discouragements were put
+      in his way. He was soon quite cut off from all the ways of living he had
+      known. He learnt what it is to be flea-bitten, saddle-sore, hungry and,
+      above all, thirsty. He was haunted by a dread of fever, and so contrived
+      strange torments for himself with overdoses of quinine. He ceased to be
+      traceable from Chexington in March, and he reappeared in the form of a
+      telegram from Karachi demanding news in May. He learnt he was the father
+      of a man-child and that all was well with Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had not expected to be so long away from any communication with the
+      outer world, and something in the nature of a stricken conscience took him
+      back to England. He found a second William Porphyry in the world,
+      dominating Chexington, and Amanda tenderly triumphant and passionate, the
+      Madonna enthroned. For William Porphyry he could feel no emotion. William
+      Porphyry was very red and ugly and protesting, feeble and aggressive, a
+      matter for a skilled nurse. To see him was to ignore him and dispel a
+      dream. It was to Amanda Benham turned again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some days he was content to adore his Madonna and listen to the
+      familiar flatteries of her love. He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda said,
+      and wiser, so that she was afraid of him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then he became aware that she was requiring him to stay at her side.
+      &ldquo;We have both had our adventures,&rdquo; she said, which struck him as an odd
+      phrase.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those conceptions
+      of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so clearly
+      understood between them had vanished from her mind. She had absolutely
+      forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had seemed to him the
+      crowning instant, the real marriage of their lives. It had gone, it had
+      left no recoverable trace in her. And upon his interpretations of that he
+      had loved her passionately for a year. She was back at exactly the ideas
+      and intentions that ruled her during their first settlement in London. She
+      wanted a joint life in the social world of London, she demanded his
+      presence, his attention, the daily practical evidences of love. It was all
+      very well for him to be away when the child was coming, but now everything
+      was different. Now he must stay by her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This time he argued no case. These issues he had settled for ever. Even an
+      indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation that began with
+      appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him. Behind these things now was
+      India. The huge problems of India had laid an unshakeable hold upon his
+      imagination. He had seen Russia, and he wanted to balance that picture by
+      a vision of the east....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington. The young man
+      displayed no further disposition to be confidentially sentimental. But he
+      seemed to have something on his mind. And Amanda said not a word about
+      him. He was a young man above suspicion, Benham felt....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these two
+      larger carnivores began to change. Except for the repetition of accustomed
+      endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense of the word. They
+      dealt chiefly with the &ldquo;Cub,&rdquo; and even there Benham felt presently that
+      the enthusiasm diminished. A new amazing quality for Amanda appeared&mdash;triteness.
+      The very writing of her letters changed as though it had suddenly lost
+      backbone. Her habitual liveliness of phrasing lost its point. Had she lost
+      her animation? Was she ill unknowingly? Where had the light gone? It was
+      as if her attention was distracted.... As if every day when she wrote her
+      mind was busy about something else.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Abruptly at last he understood. A fact that had never been stated, never
+      formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to
+      convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question
+      perceived to be THERE....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He left a record of that moment of realization.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had never
+      seen Amanda before. Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with that same
+      dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a pitiless, a scientific
+      distinctness that has neither light nor shadow....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course,&rdquo; I said, and then presently I got up very softly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin. I wanted to
+      feel the largeness of the sky. I went out upon the deck. We were off the
+      coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment, there comes back to me
+      also the faint flavour of spice in the air, the low line of the coast, the
+      cool flooding abundance of the Indian moonlight, the swish of the black
+      water against the side of the ship. And a perception of infinite loss, as
+      if the limitless heavens above this earth and below to the very uttermost
+      star were just one boundless cavity from which delight had fled....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Of course I had lost her. I knew it with absolute certainty. I knew it
+      from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her needs. I knew it
+      from every line she had written me in the last three months. I knew it
+      intuitively. She had been unfaithful. She must have been unfaithful.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      21
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters. Let me be at
+      least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I may have been led
+      into by force of my passions. Always I have despised jealousy....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the aristocratic life
+      to be achieved. They come in a certain order, and in that order the spirit
+      of man is armed against them less and less efficiently. Of fear and my
+      struggle against fear I have told already. I am fearful. I am a physical
+      coward until I can bring shame and anger to my assistance, but in
+      overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole body of human tradition.
+      Every one, the basest creatures, every Hottentot, every stunted creature
+      that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the instinctive
+      constitution of man is at fault here and that fear is shameful and must be
+      subdued. The race is on one's side. And so there is a vast traditional
+      support for a man against the Second Limitation, the limitation of
+      physical indulgence. It is not so universal as the first, there is a
+      grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness, but common pride is
+      against it. And in this matter my temperament has been my help: I am
+      fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil from
+      excess. It is no great virtue; it happens so; it is something in the
+      nerves of my skin. I cannot endure myself unshaven or in any way unclean;
+      I am tormented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories, and after
+      I had once loved Amanda I could not&mdash;unless some irrational impulse
+      to get equal with her had caught me&mdash;have broken my faith to her,
+      whatever breach there was in her faith to me....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more easily
+      clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that distinctive
+      virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment and anger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I despised a jealous man. There is a traditional discredit of jealousy,
+      not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very strong. But the
+      general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with the supposition
+      that there is no cause for jealousy, that it is unreasonable suspicion.
+      Given a cause then tradition speaks with an uncertain voice....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was
+      impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable to
+      imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as
+      fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my
+      image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that she
+      was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently,
+      gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a pool, that
+      knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated up into my
+      consciousness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me! Outrageously. Abominably.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this
+      question. My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right whatever
+      to her love or loyalty. I must have that very clear....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except accidentally
+      here and there, incompatible with the domestic life. It means going hither
+      and thither in the universe of thought as much as in the universe of
+      matter, it means adventure, it means movement and adventure that must
+      needs be hopelessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it means
+      self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit into the welfare of a
+      family. In all ages, directly society had risen above the level of a
+      barbaric tribal village, this need of a release from the family for
+      certain necessary types of people has been recognized. It was met
+      sometimes informally, sometimes formally, by the growth and establishment
+      of special classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of pledged
+      knights, of a great variety of non-family people, whose concern was the
+      larger collective life that opens out beyond the simple necessities and
+      duties and loyalties of the steading and of the craftsman's house.
+      Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form of celibacy; but
+      besides that there have been a hundred institutional variations of the
+      common life to meet the need of the special man, the man who must go deep
+      and the man who must go far. A vowed celibacy ceased to be a tolerable
+      rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic idea entered the mind of man,
+      because a celibate aristocracy means the abandonment of the racial future
+      to a proletariat of base unleaderly men. That was plain to Plato. It was
+      plain to Campanelea. It was plain to the Protestant reformers. But the
+      world has never yet gone on to the next step beyond that recognition, to
+      the recognition of feminine aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers,
+      as untrammelled by domestic servitudes and family relationships as the men
+      of their kind. That I see has always been my idea since in my
+      undergraduate days I came under the spell of Plato. It was a matter of
+      course that my first gift to Amanda should be his REPUBLIC. I loved Amanda
+      transfigured in that dream....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are no such women....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with myself. I
+      had no sound reason for supposing that. I did suppose that. I did not
+      perceive that not only was she younger than myself, but that while I had
+      been going through a mill of steely education, kept close, severely
+      exercised, polished by discussion, she had but the weak training of a not
+      very good school, some scrappy reading, the vague discussions of village
+      artists, and the draped and decorated novelties of the 'advanced.' It all
+      went to nothing on the impact of the world.... She showed herself the
+      woman the world has always known, no miracle, and the alternative was for
+      me to give myself to her in the ancient way, to serve her happiness, to
+      control her and delight and companion her, or to let her go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm and
+      her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home. She demands the
+      concentration of a man. Not to be able to command that is her failure. Not
+      to give her that is to shame her. As I had shamed Amanda....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      22
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are no such women.&rdquo; He had written this in and struck it out, and
+      then at some later time written it in again. There it stayed now as his
+      last persuasion, but it set White thinking and doubting. And, indeed,
+      there was another sheet of pencilled broken stuff that seemed to glance at
+      quite another type of womanhood.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      23
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the remaking of
+      the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as great as those
+      from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes. These women must become
+      aristocratic through their own innate impulse, they must be self-called to
+      their lives, exactly as men must be; there is no making an aristocrat
+      without a predisposition for rule and nobility. And they have to discover
+      and struggle against just exactly the limitations that we have to struggle
+      against. They have to conquer not only fear but indulgence, indulgence of
+      a softer, more insidious quality, and jealousy&mdash;proprietorship....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand times in
+      my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and desired a mate.
+      A mate&mdash;not a possession. It is a need almost naively simple. If only
+      one could have a woman who thought of one and with one! Though she were on
+      the other side of the world and busied about a thousand things....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;'WITH one,' I see it must be rather than 'OF one.' That 'of one' is just
+      the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Man is a mating creature. It is not good to be alone. But mating means a
+      mate....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers. 'Dancing
+      attendance'&mdash;as they used to say. We should meet upon our ways as the
+      great carnivores do....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That at any rate was a sound idea. Though we only played with it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible
+      satisfaction now for me. What is the good of dreaming? Life and chance
+      have played a trick upon my body and soul. I am mated, though I am mated
+      to a phantom. I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton's Amanda, but Amanda
+      in armour, the Amanda of my dreams. Sense, and particularly the sense of
+      beauty, lies deeper than reason in us. There can be no mate for me now
+      unless she comes with Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and Amanda's quick
+      movements and her clever hands....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      24
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There were things between us two as lovers,&mdash;love, things more
+      beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind
+      hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression,
+      images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight
+      in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off wonderful
+      music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing softly, of
+      floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and sudden as
+      the knife of an assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears, tears that
+      are happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations, gratitudes,
+      sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft eyelid closed in
+      sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard unexpectedly; sweet,
+      dear magical things that I can find no words for....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that she was
+      not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that has been
+      between us more cheaply than I did? It does not change one jot of it for
+      me. At the time she did not hold it cheaply. She forgets where I do not
+      forget....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      25
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda and
+      himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He did not at once turn homeward. It was in Ceylon that he dropped his
+      work and came home. At Colombo he found a heap of letters awaiting him,
+      and there were two of these that had started at the same time. They had
+      been posted in London on one eventful afternoon. Lady Marayne and Amanda
+      had quarrelled violently. Two earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women,
+      full of neat but belated repartee, separated to write their simultaneous
+      letters. Each letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.
+      Lady Marayne told her story ruthlessly. Amanda, on the other hand,
+      generalized, and explained. Sir Philip's adoration of her was a
+      love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure. Was there no trust nor
+      courage in the world? She would defy all jealous scandal. She would not
+      even banish him from her side. Surely the Cheetah could trust her. But the
+      pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond Amanda's explaining. The little
+      lady's dignity had been stricken. &ldquo;I have been used as a cloak,&rdquo; she
+      wrote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Her phrases were vivid. She quoted the very words of Amanda, words she had
+      overheard at Chexington in the twilight. They were no invention. They were
+      the very essence of Amanda, the lover. It was as sure as if Benham had
+      heard the sound of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen, as if she had
+      crept by him, stooping and rustling softly. It brought back the living
+      sense of her, excited, flushed, reckless; his wild-haired Amanda of
+      infinite delight.... All day those words of hers pursued him. All night
+      they flared across the black universe. He buried his face in the pillows
+      and they whispered softly in his ear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the stirring
+      quiet of the stars.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He sent no notice of his coming back. Nor did he come back with a definite
+      plan. But he wanted to get at Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      26
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was with Amanda he had to reckon. Towards Easton he felt scarcely any
+      anger at all. Easton he felt only existed for him because Amanda willed to
+      have it so.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger. His
+      devotion filled Benham with scorn. His determination to serve Amanda at
+      any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights for her, his
+      humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her moods and
+      happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility. That rage
+      against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist against a blackleg.
+      Are all the women to fall to the men who will be their master-slaves and
+      keepers? But it was not simply that Benham felt men must be freed from
+      this incessant attendance; women too must free themselves from their
+      almost instinctive demand for an attendant....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings. Never in
+      his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and won
+      and competed for and fought over. So that it was Amanda he wanted to reach
+      and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses only to
+      fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and jealous fury. But the
+      forces that were driving him home now were the forces below the level of
+      reason and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and desire, profound
+      aboriginal urgencies. He thought, indeed, very little as he lay in his
+      berth or sulked on deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless invasion of
+      exasperating images that ever and again would so wring him that his
+      muscles would tighten and his hands clench or he would find himself
+      restraining a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole world.
+      She filled the skies. She bent over him and mocked him. She became a
+      mystery of passion and dark beauty. She was the sin of the world. One
+      breathed her in the winds of the sea. She had taken to herself the
+      greatness of elemental things....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see that she
+      was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather tired and very
+      frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an evening-dress of
+      unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of gold and colour about
+      her wrists and neck.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him
+      homeward. He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has
+      greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to kill
+      than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      27
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He took them by surprise. It had been his intention to take them by
+      surprise. Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near Charing
+      Cross. In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in Lancaster
+      Gate. The butler was deferentially amazed. Mrs. Benham was, he said, at a
+      theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought some other people also. He
+      did not know when she would be back. She might go on to supper. It was not
+      the custom for the servants to wait up for her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham went into the study that reduplicated his former rooms in Finacue
+      Street and sat down before the fire the butler lit for him. He sent the
+      man to bed, and fell into profound meditation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was nearly two o'clock when he heard the sound of her latchkey and went
+      out at once upon the landing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The half-door stood open and Easton's car was outside. She stood in the
+      middle of the hall and relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he was
+      carrying.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good-night,&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;I am so tired.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;My wonderful goddess,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, then started, stared, and
+      wrenched herself out of his arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon them, white-faced
+      and inexpressive. Easton dropped back a pace. For a moment no one moved
+      nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton shut the half-door and shut out
+      the noises of the road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For some seconds Benham regarded them, and as he did so his spirit
+      changed....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Everything he had thought of saying and doing vanished out of his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended the staircase. When he
+      was five or six steps above them, he spoke. &ldquo;Just sit down here,&rdquo; he said,
+      with a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself upon the stairs. &ldquo;DO sit
+      down,&rdquo; he said with a sudden testiness as they continued standing. &ldquo;I know
+      all about this affair. Do please sit down and let us talk.... Everybody's
+      gone to bed long ago.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Why have you come back like this?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I wish you would sit down, Easton,&rdquo; he said in a voice of subdued
+      savagery.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why have you come back?&rdquo; Sir Philip Easton found his voice to ask.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;SIT down,&rdquo; Benham spat, and Easton obeyed unwillingly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I came back,&rdquo; Benham went on, &ldquo;to see to all this. Why else? I don't&mdash;now
+      I see you&mdash;feel very fierce about it. But it has distressed me. You
+      look changed, Amanda, and fagged. And your hair is untidy. It's as if
+      something had happened to you and made you a stranger.... You two people
+      are lovers. Very natural and simple, but I want to get out of it. Yes, I
+      want to get out of it. That wasn't quite my idea, but now I see it is.
+      It's queer, but on the whole I feel sorry for you. All of us, poor humans&mdash;.
+      There's reason to be sorry for all of us. We're full of lusts and
+      uneasiness and resentments that we haven't the will to control. What do
+      you two people want me to do to you? Would you like a divorce, Amanda?
+      It's the clean, straight thing, isn't it? Or would the scandal hurt you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Give us a divorce,&rdquo; said Easton, looking to her to confirm him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda shook her head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want a divorce,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Then what do you want?&rdquo; asked Benham with sudden asperity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want a divorce,&rdquo; she repeated. &ldquo;Why do you, after a long silence,
+      come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was the way it took me,&rdquo; said Benham, after a little interval.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You have left me for long months.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes. I was angry. And it was ridiculous to be angry. I thought I wanted
+      to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is to help you
+      out of this miserable mess&mdash;and then get away from you. You two would
+      like to marry. You ought to be married.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would die to make Amanda happy,&rdquo; said Easton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make her happy. That you may
+      find more of a strain. Less tragic and more tiresome. I, on the other
+      hand, want neither to die nor live for her.&rdquo; Amanda moved sharply. &ldquo;It's
+      extraordinary what amazing vapours a lonely man may get into his head. If
+      you don't want a divorce then I suppose things might go on as they are
+      now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I hate things as they are now,&rdquo; said Easton. &ldquo;I hate this falsehood and
+      deception.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You would hate the scandal just as much,&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I would not care what the scandal was unless it hurt you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be only a temporary inconvenience,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Every one
+      would sympathize with you.... The whole thing is so natural.... People
+      would be glad to forget very soon. They did with my mother.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Amanda, &ldquo;it isn't so easy as that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She seemed to come to a decision.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pip,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;I want to talk to&mdash;HIM&mdash;alone.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity. &ldquo;But why?&rdquo;
+       he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I do,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is a thing for US.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Pip, I want to talk to him alone. There is something&mdash;something I
+      can't say before you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Shall I wait outside?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No, Pip. Go home. Yes,&mdash;there are some things you must leave to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the younger
+      man. The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to be at any cost
+      splendid. He felt&mdash;and it was a most unexpected and disconcerting
+      feeling&mdash;that he was no longer confederated with Amanda; that prior,
+      more fundamental and greater associations prevailed over his little new
+      grip upon her mind and senses. He stared at husband and wife aghast in
+      this realization. Then his resolute romanticism came to his help. &ldquo;I would
+      trust you&mdash;&rdquo; he began. &ldquo;If you tell me to go&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She laid her hand upon his arm. &ldquo;Go, my dear Pip,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;Go.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham as
+      though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen, somewhere,
+      he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in a gap that
+      otherwise he could not have supplied.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly
+      dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WELL?&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She held out her arms to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Why did you leave me, Cheetah? Why did you leave me?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      28
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham affected to ignore those proffered arms. But they recalled in a
+      swift rush the animal anger that had brought him back to England. To
+      remind him of desire now was to revive an anger stronger than any desire.
+      He spoke seeking to hurt her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am wondering now,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;why the devil I came back.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You had to come back to me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could have written just as well about these things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;CHEETAH,&rdquo; she said softly, and came towards him slowly, stooping forward
+      and looking into his eyes, &ldquo;you had to come back to see your old Leopard.
+      Your wretched Leopard. Who has rolled in the dirt. And is still yours.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you want a divorce? How are we to fix things, Amanda?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah, I will tell you how we will fix things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She dropped upon the step below him. She laid her hands with a deliberate
+      softness upon him, she gave a toss so that her disordered hair was a
+      little more disordered, and brought her soft chin down to touch his knees.
+      Her eyes implored him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah,&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;You are going to forgive.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He sat rigid, meeting her eyes.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda,&rdquo; he said at last, &ldquo;you would be astonished if I kicked you away
+      from me and trampled over you to the door. That is what I want to do.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do it,&rdquo; she said, and the grip of her hands tightened. &ldquo;Cheetah, dear! I
+      would love you to kill me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't want to kill you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her eyes dilated. &ldquo;Beat me.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And I haven't the remotest intention of making love to you,&rdquo; he said, and
+      pushed her soft face and hands away from him as if he would stand up.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She caught hold of him again. &ldquo;Stay with me,&rdquo; she said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no effort to shake off her grip. He looked at the dark cloud of
+      her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of old delights
+      made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as he spoke. &ldquo;Dear
+      Leopard,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;we humans are the most streaky of conceivable things.
+      I thought I hated you. I do. I hate you like poison. And also I do not
+      hate you at all.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then abruptly he was standing over her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She rose to her knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stay here, old Cheetah!&rdquo; she said. &ldquo;This is your house. I am your wife.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He went towards the unfastened front door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she cried with a note of despair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He halted at the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Amanda, I will come to-morrow. I will come in the morning, in the sober
+      London daylight, and then we will settle things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled. He spoke as one who
+      remarks upon a quite unexpected fact....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human being that I wanted so
+      little to kill.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      29
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White found a fragment that might have been written within a week of those
+      last encounters of Benham and Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The thing that astonished me most in Amanda was the change in her mental
+      quality.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;With me in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she had
+      deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself. Her
+      personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it was
+      gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing of poses
+      and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei. Beneath that
+      surface I could not discover anything individual at all. Fear and a
+      grasping quality, such as God gave us all when he gave us hands; but the
+      individual I knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard was gone. Whither,
+      I cannot imagine. An amazing disappearance. Clean out of space and time
+      like a soul lost for ever.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene, she
+      acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in reality....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this way, by
+      cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she despised.... There can
+      be no inequality in love. Give and take must balance. One must be one's
+      natural self or the whole business is an indecent trick, a vile use of
+      life! To use inferiors in love one must needs talk down to them, interpret
+      oneself in their insufficient phrases, pretend, sentimentalize. And it is
+      clear that unless oneself is to be lost, one must be content to leave
+      alone all those people that one can reach only by sentimentalizing. But
+      Amanda&mdash;and yet somehow I love her for it still&mdash;could not leave
+      any one alone. So she was always feverishly weaving nets of false
+      relationship. Until her very self was forgotten. So she will go on until
+      the end. With Easton it had been necessary for her to key herself to a
+      simple exalted romanticism that was entirely insincere. She had so
+      accustomed herself to these poses that her innate gestures were forgotten.
+      She could not recover them; she could not even reinvent them. Between us
+      there were momentary gleams as though presently we should be our frank
+      former selves again. They were never more than momentary....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And that was all that this astonishing man had seen fit to tell of his
+      last parting from his wife.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Perhaps he did Amanda injustice. Perhaps there was a stronger thread of
+      reality in her desire to recover him than he supposed. Clearly he believed
+      that under the circumstances Amanda would have tried to recover anybody.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She had dressed for that morning's encounter in a very becoming and
+      intimate wrap of soft mauve and white silk, and she had washed and dried
+      her dark hair so that it was a vapour about her face. She set herself with
+      a single mind to persuade herself and Benham that they were inseparable
+      lovers, and she would not be deflected by his grim determination to
+      discuss the conditions of their separation. When he asked her whether she
+      wanted a divorce, she offered to throw over Sir Philip and banish him for
+      ever as lightly as a great lady might sacrifice an objectionable poodle to
+      her connubial peace.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham passed through perplexing phases, so that she herself began to feel
+      that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands. His initial grimness
+      she could understand, and partially its breakdown into irritability. But
+      she was puzzled by his laughter. For he laughed abruptly.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of tremendous tragedy. And
+      really,&mdash;you are a Lark.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then overriding her altogether, he told her what he meant to do about
+      their future and the future of their little son.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You don't want a divorce and a fuss. Then I'll leave things. I perceive
+      I've no intention of marrying any more. But you'd better do the straight
+      thing. People forget and forgive. Especially when there is no one about
+      making a fuss against you.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for shirking it. We'll
+      both be able to get at the boy then. You'll not hurt him, and I shall want
+      to see him. It's better for the boy anyhow not to have a divorce.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'll not stand in your way. I'll get a little flat and I shan't come too
+      much to London, and when I do, you can get out of town. You must be
+      discreet about Easton, and if people say anything about him, send them to
+      me. After all, this is our private affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We'll go on about money matters as we have been going. I trust to you not
+      to run me into overwhelming debts. And, of course, if at any time, you do
+      want to marry&mdash;on account of children or anything&mdash;if nobody
+      knows of this conversation we can be divorced then....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while Amanda
+      gathered her forces for her last appeal.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down
+      before him and clung to his knees. He struggled ridiculously to get
+      himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate on the
+      floor with her dishevelled hair about her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark
+      Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet
+      without. He had come back. The door reopened. There was a slight pause,
+      and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the second
+      housemaid. There are moments, suspended fragments of time rather than
+      links in its succession, when the human eye is more intelligible than any
+      words.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a click of
+      the door.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;DAMN!&rdquo; said Amanda.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then slowly she rose to her knees.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      She meditated through vast moments.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's a cursed thing to be a woman,&rdquo; said Amanda. She stood up. She put
+      her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot about it.
+      After another long interval of thought she spoke.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cheetah!&rdquo; she said, &ldquo;Old Cheetah!...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't THINK it of you....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a
+      reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who packs
+      a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      30
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in Danebury
+      Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham's private processes
+      the morning after this affair.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London. She had
+      seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly decorous
+      person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to behave violently
+      or surprise a head chambermaid in any way. On the morning of his departure
+      she was told by the first-floor waiter that the occupant of Room 26 had
+      complained of an uproar in the night, and almost immediately she was
+      summoned to see Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little
+      obscure the condition of the room behind him. He was carefully dressed,
+      and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever. But one of his hands
+      was tied up in a white bandage.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I am going this morning,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I am going down now to breakfast. I
+      have had a few little accidents with some of the things in the room and I
+      have cut my hand. I want you to tell the manager and see that they are
+      properly charged for on the bill.... Thank you.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's things were all packed up and the room had an air of having been
+      straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive cataclysm. One
+      or two items that the chambermaid might possibly have overlooked in the
+      normal course of things were carefully exhibited. For example, the sheet
+      had been torn into half a dozen strips and they were lying side by side on
+      the bed. The clock on the mantelpiece had been knocked into the fireplace
+      and then pounded to pieces. All the looking-glasses in the room were
+      smashed, apparently the electric lamp that stood on the night table by the
+      bedside had been wrenched off and flung or hammered about amidst the other
+      breakables. And there was a considerable amount of blood splashed about
+      the room. The head chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the
+      spectacle and summoned her most convenient friend, the head chambermaid on
+      the third floor, to her aid. The first-floor waiter joined their
+      deliberations and several housemaids displayed a respectful interest in
+      the matter. Finally they invoked the manager. He was still contemplating
+      the scene of the disorder when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates
+      warned him of Benham's return.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly tranquil.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I had a kind of nightmare,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;I am fearfully sorry to have
+      disarranged your room. You must charge me for the inconvenience as well as
+      for the damage.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      31
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An aristocrat cannot be a lover.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of life and
+      the intricacies of another human being. I do not mean that one may not
+      love. One loves the more because one does not concentrate one's love. One
+      loves nations, the people passing in the street, beasts hurt by the
+      wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons in tears....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's hands I
+      do not think one can expect to be loved.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;An aristocrat must do without close personal love....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper. The writing ended
+      halfway down the page. Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it
+      was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter
+      that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations. Its incompleteness made
+      its expression perfect....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There Benham's love experience ended. He turned to the great business of
+      the world. Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like Fear
+      they were to be dismissed as far as possible and subdued when they could
+      not be altogether dismissed. Whatever stirrings of blood or imagination
+      there were in him after that parting, whatever failures from this
+      resolution, they left no trace on the rest of his research, which was
+      concerned with the hates of peoples and classes and war and peace and the
+      possibilities science unveils and starry speculations of what mankind may
+      do.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      32
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter with
+      Lady Marayne.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger and
+      distress. Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so hopelessly
+      dispersed and mixed. And when for a moment it seemed to him that she was
+      not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all, then with an instant
+      eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory gleam. &ldquo;What are you doing in
+      England, Poff?&rdquo; she demanded. &ldquo;And what are you going to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Nothing! And you are going to leave her in your house, with your property
+      and a lover. If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come back? And why did
+      you ever marry her? You might have known; her father was a swindler. She's
+      begotten of deceit. She'll tell her own story while you are away, and a
+      pretty story she'll make of it.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I never wanted you to go away from her. If you'd stayed and watched her
+      as a man should, as I begged you and implored you to do. Didn't I tell
+      you, Poff? Didn't I warn you?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But now what am I to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There you are! That's just a man's way. You get yourself into this
+      trouble, you follow your passions and your fancies and fads and then you
+      turn to me! How can I help you now, Poff? If you'd listened to me before!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her blue eyes were demonstratively round.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Yes, but&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I warned you,&rdquo; she interrupted. &ldquo;I warned you. I've done all I could for
+      you. It isn't that I haven't seen through her. When she came to me at
+      first with that made-up story of a baby! And all about loving me like her
+      own mother. But I did what I could. I thought we might still make the best
+      of a bad job. And then&mdash;. I might have known she couldn't leave Pip
+      alone.... But for weeks I didn't dream. I wouldn't dream. Right under my
+      nose. The impudence of it!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Her voice broke. &ldquo;Such a horrid mess! Such a hopeless, horrid mess!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She wiped away a bright little tear....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's all alike. It's your way with us. All of you. There isn't a man in
+      the world deserves to have a woman in the world. We do all we can for you.
+      We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for you and we talk for you. All
+      the sweet, warm little women there are! And then you go away from us!
+      There never was a woman yet who pleased and satisfied a man, who did not
+      lose him. Give you everything and off you must go! Lovers, mothers....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother's troubles did not deal
+      exclusively with himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But Amanda,&rdquo; he began.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If you'd looked after her properly, it would have been right enough. Pip
+      was as good as gold until she undermined him.... A woman can't wait about
+      like an umbrella in a stand.... He was just a boy.... Only of course there
+      she was&mdash;a novelty. It is perfectly easy to understand. She flattered
+      him.... Men are such fools.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Still&mdash;it's no good saying that now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But she'll spend all your money, Poff! She'll break your back with debts.
+      What's to prevent her? With him living on her! For that's what it comes to
+      practically.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Well, what am I to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You aren't going back without tying her up, Poff? You ought to stop every
+      farthing of her money&mdash;every farthing. It's your duty.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I can't do things like that.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But have you no Shame? To let that sort of thing go on!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I don't feel the Shame of it&mdash; And I don't.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And that money&mdash;. I got you that money, Poff! It was my money.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham stared at her perplexed. &ldquo;What am I to do?&rdquo; he asked.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay her through a solicitor. Say
+      that if she sees him ONCE again&mdash;&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He reflected. &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said at last.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Poff!&rdquo; she cried, &ldquo;every time I see you, you are more and more like your
+      father. You're going off&mdash;just as he did. That baffled, MULISH look&mdash;priggish&mdash;solemn!
+      Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor woman has to bring into the world. But
+      you'll do nothing. I know you'll do nothing. You'll stand everything. You&mdash;you
+      Cuckold! And she'll drive by me, she'll pass me in theatres with the money
+      that ought to have been mine! Oh! Oh!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other. But she
+      went on talking. Faster and faster, less and less coherently; more and
+      more wildly abusive. Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham sighed
+      profoundly....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It brought the scene to a painful end....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in
+      default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her&mdash;he
+      could never define what he owed her.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And yet, what on earth was one to do?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had
+      misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred
+      goodwill. He went down to see him before he returned to India. But if
+      there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham senior, it had been very
+      carefully boarded over. The parental mind and attention were entirely
+      engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD about the heuristic method.
+      Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the thing was
+      rankling almost unendurably. It seemed to be a relief to him to show his
+      son very fully the essentially illogical position of his assailant. He was
+      entirely inattentive to Benham's carefully made conversational
+      opportunities. He would be silent at times while Benham talked and then he
+      would break out suddenly with: &ldquo;What seems to me so unreasonable, so
+      ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second argument&mdash;if one can
+      call it an argument&mdash;.... A man who reasons as he does is bound to
+      get laughed at. If people will only see it....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      <a name="link2HCH0006" id="link2HCH0006">
+      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
+    </p>
+    <div style="height: 4em;">
+      <br /><br /><br /><br />
+    </div>
+    <h2>
+      CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+    </h2>
+    <p>
+      1
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913. Sometimes the
+      two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection, sometimes
+      with great bitterness. When he met White in Johannesburg during the strike
+      period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in London and to settle their
+      relationship upon a new and more definite footing. It was her suggestion
+      that they should meet.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction. He could not
+      persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his relations to her
+      squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at no precise
+      point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ignoble step.
+      Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life. Like all of
+      us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life in a
+      certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an entirely
+      different and unexpected way.... He had been ready for noble deeds and
+      villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the dominant fact
+      of his personal life was a perplexing riddle. He could not hate and
+      condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of exoneration; he
+      could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without immediate shame and
+      resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he could not banish her
+      from his mind.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his mind;
+      he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but often he
+      could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing denied, she was
+      almost more potent than she had been as a thing accepted. Meanwhile he
+      worked. His nervous irritability increased, but it did not hinder the
+      steady development of his Research.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and
+      method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put
+      together under his headings of the first three &ldquo;Limitations.&rdquo; He had
+      resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that instinctive
+      preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which he chose to
+      term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of Amanda he had to a
+      large extent succeeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda. He stuck the more grimly
+      to his Research to drown that beating in his brain.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
+      prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this dream of
+      a larger human purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and define
+      that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and comprehending
+      form of all the activities of the noble life. One cannot be noble, he had
+      come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to an end. To make human
+      life, collectively and in detail, a thing more comprehensive, more
+      beautiful, more generous and coherent than it is to-day seemed to him the
+      fundamental intention of all nobility. He believed more and more firmly
+      that the impulses to make and help and subserve great purposes are
+      abundantly present in the world, that they are inhibited by hasty
+      thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and that the real ennoblement
+      of human life was not so much a creation as a release. He lumped the
+      preventive and destructive forces that keep men dispersed, unhappy, and
+      ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and he made this Prejudice his
+      fourth and greatest and most difficult limitation. In one place he had
+      written it, &ldquo;Prejudice or Divisions.&rdquo; That being subdued in oneself and in
+      the world, then in the measure of its subjugation, the new life of our
+      race, the great age, the noble age, would begin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world about
+      him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties and
+      mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White
+      struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of this
+      search for &ldquo;Prejudice.&rdquo; It seemed to White to be at once the most
+      magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises. It was indeed no
+      less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure and
+      disorder.... And it was all too manifest to White also that the last place
+      in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the back of
+      his own head.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array of
+      influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of patriotism,
+      religious and social intolerance, every social consequence of muddle
+      headedness, every dividing force indeed except the purely personal
+      dissensions between man and man. And he developed a metaphysical
+      interpretation of these troubles. &ldquo;No doubt,&rdquo; he wrote in one place, &ldquo;much
+      of the evil between different kinds of men is due to uncultivated feeling,
+      to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to bad thinking.&rdquo; At times
+      he seemed on the verge of the persuasion that most human trouble is really
+      due to bad metaphysics. It was, one must remark, an extraordinary journey
+      he had made; he had started from chivalry and arrived at metaphysics;
+      every knight he held must be a logician, and ultimate bravery is courage
+      of the mind. One thinks of his coming to this conclusion with knit brows
+      and balancing intentness above whole gulfs of bathos&mdash;very much as he
+      had once walked the Leysin Bisse....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men do not know how to think,&rdquo; he insisted&mdash;getting along the
+      planks; &ldquo;and they will not realize that they do not know how to think.
+      Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of misconceptions....
+      Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the mind, and muddled thinking
+      as ignoble as dirty conduct.... Infinitely more disastrous.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And again he wrote: &ldquo;Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too eager
+      to get into action. There is our deepest trouble. He takes conclusions
+      ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry. Life is so short that he thinks
+      it better to err than wait. He has no patience, no faith in anything but
+      himself. He thinks he is a being when in reality he is only a link in a
+      being, and so he is more anxious to be complete than right. The last
+      devotion of which he is capable is that devotion of the mind which suffers
+      partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive thought. He scamps his
+      thought and finishes his performance, and before he is dead it is already
+      being abandoned and begun all over again by some one else in the same
+      egotistical haste....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these words
+      should have been written by a man who walked the plank to fresh ideas with
+      the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward, and
+      who acted time after time with an altogether disastrous hastiness.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      2
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the
+      cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice
+      and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research
+      Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays and
+      abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale, than you
+      can profess religion and refuse to think about God. In the past it was
+      possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to
+      unexamined things. One could be loyal to unexamined things because they
+      were unchallenged things. But now everything is challenged. By the time of
+      his second visit to Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious and deliberate
+      aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal responsibility had
+      already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he was, as it were, an
+      uncrowned king in the world. To be noble is to be aristocratic, that is to
+      say, a ruler. Thence it follows that aristocracy is multiple kingship, and
+      to be an aristocrat is to partake both of the nature of philosopher and
+      king....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no means
+      necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in quality, petty in
+      spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and limited, fall far short of
+      kingship. Nevertheless, there IS nobility, there IS kingship, or this
+      earth is a dustbin and mankind but a kind of skin-disease upon a planet.
+      From that it is an easy step to this idea, the idea whose first expression
+      had already so touched the imagination of Amanda, of a sort of diffused
+      and voluntary kingship scattered throughout mankind. The aristocrats are
+      not at the high table, the kings are not enthroned, those who are
+      enthroned are but pretenders and SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar; the real
+      king and ruler is every man who sets aside the naive passions and
+      self-interest of the common life for the rule and service of the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary writing. It
+      is one of those ideas that seem to appear simultaneously at many points in
+      the world, and it is impossible to say now how far Benham was an
+      originator of this idea, and how far he simply resonated to its expression
+      by others. It was far more likely that Prothero, getting it heaven knows
+      where, had spluttered it out and forgotten it, leaving it to germinate in
+      the mind of his friend....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to Benham as
+      his life went on. When Benham walked the Bisse he was just a youngster
+      resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled in the jungle by night
+      he was there for all mankind. With every year he became more and more
+      definitely to himself a consecrated man as kings are consecrated. Only
+      that he was self-consecrated, and anointed only in his heart. At last he
+      was, so to speak, Haroun al Raschid again, going unsuspected about the
+      world, because the palace of his security would not tell him the secrets
+      of men's disorders. He was no longer a creature of circumstances, he was
+      kingly, unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the Danes. In the great later
+      accumulations of his Research the personal matter, the introspection, the
+      intimate discussion of motive, becomes less and less. He forgets himself
+      in the exaltation of kingliness. He worries less and less over the
+      particular rightness of his definite acts. In these later papers White
+      found Benham abstracted, self-forgetful, trying to find out with an ever
+      increased self-detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why
+      there are massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why we let famine,
+      disease and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast multitudes
+      in the midst of possible plenty. And when he found out and as far as he
+      found out, he meant quite simply and earnestly to apply his knowledge....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      3
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The intellectualism of Benham intensified to the end. His definition of
+      Prejudice impressed White as being the most bloodless and philosophical
+      formula that ever dominated the mind of a man.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Prejudice,&rdquo; Benham had written, &ldquo;is that common incapacity of the human
+      mind to understand that a difference in any respect is not a difference in
+      all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by an instinctive
+      hostility to what is unlike ourselves. We exaggerate classification and
+      then charge it with mischievous emotion by referring it to ourselves.&rdquo; And
+      under this comprehensive formula he proceeded to study and attack Family
+      Prejudice, National Prejudice, Race Prejudice, War, Class Prejudice,
+      Professional Prejudice, Sex Prejudice, in the most industrious and
+      elaborate manner. Whether one regards one's self or others he held that
+      these prejudices are evil things. &ldquo;From the point of view of human welfare
+      they break men up into wars and conflicts, make them an easy prey to those
+      who trade upon suspicion and hostility, prevent sane collective
+      co-operations, cripple and embitter life. From the point of view of
+      personal aristocracy they make men vulgar, violent, unjust and futile. All
+      the conscious life of the aristocrat must be a constant struggle against
+      false generalizations; it is as much his duty to free himself from that as
+      from fear, indulgence, and jealousy; it is a larger and more elaborate
+      task, but it is none the less cardinal and essential. Indeed it is more
+      cardinal and essential. The true knight has to be not only no coward, no
+      self-pamperer, no egotist. He has to be a philosopher. He has to be no
+      hasty or foolish thinker. His judgment no more than his courage is to be
+      taken by surprise.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To subdue fear, desire and jealousy, is the aristocrat's personal affair,
+      it is his ritual and discipline, like a knight watching his arms; but the
+      destruction of division and prejudice and all their forms and
+      establishments, is his real task, that is the common work of knighthood.
+      It is a task to be done in a thousand ways; one man working by persuasion,
+      another by example, this one overthrowing some crippling restraint upon
+      the freedom of speech and the spread of knowledge, and that preparing
+      himself for a war that will shatter a tyrannous presumption. Most
+      imaginative literature, all scientific investigation, all sound criticism,
+      all good building, all good manufacture, all sound politics, every honesty
+      and every reasoned kindliness contribute to this release of men from the
+      heat and confusions of our present world.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part of
+      his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he was not
+      making his own personal research alone, but, side by side with a vast,
+      masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of others; that this great
+      idea of his was under kindred forms the great idea of thousands, that it
+      was breaking as the dawn breaks, simultaneously to great numbers of
+      people, and that the time was not far off when the new aristocracy, the
+      disguised rulers of the world, would begin to realize their common bent
+      and effort. Into these latter papers there creeps more and more frequently
+      a new phraseology, such expressions as the &ldquo;Invisible King&rdquo; and the
+      &ldquo;Spirit of Kingship,&rdquo; so that as Benham became personally more and more
+      solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of mankind.
+      He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices worked, to get
+      at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of prejudice, and to
+      devise means for its treatment, destruction or neutralization. He had no
+      great faith in the power of pure reasonableness; his psychological ideas
+      were modern, and he had grasped the fact that the power of most of the
+      great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual
+      level. Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
+      with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to discover
+      their sub-rational springs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven
+      Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience
+      decided could not possibly &ldquo;make a book,&rdquo; consisted of notes and
+      discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this or
+      that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary
+      trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in
+      Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom he had his first really
+      illuminating encounter with race and culture prejudice. His examination of
+      the social and political condition of Russia seems to have left him much
+      more hopeful than was the common feeling of liberal-minded people during
+      the years of depression that followed the revolution of 1906, and it was
+      upon the race question that his attention concentrated.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India. Here in an entirely
+      different environment was another discord of race and culture, and he
+      found in his study of it much that illuminated and corrected his
+      impressions of the Russian issue. A whole drawer was devoted to a
+      comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into human dissensions in
+      lower Bengal. Here there were not only race but culture conflicts, and he
+      could work particularly upon the differences between men of the same race
+      who were Hindus, Christians and Mahometans respectively. He could compare
+      the Bengali Mahometan not only with the Bengali Brahminist, but also with
+      the Mahometan from the north-west. &ldquo;If one could scrape off all the creed
+      and training, would one find much the same thing at the bottom, or
+      something fundamentally so different that no close homogeneous social life
+      and not even perhaps a life of just compromise is possible between the
+      different races of mankind?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His answer to that was a confident one. &ldquo;There are no such natural and
+      unalterable differences in character and quality between any two sorts of
+      men whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly co-operation in the
+      world impossible,&rdquo; he wrote.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But he was not satisfied with his observations in India. He found the
+      prevalence of caste ideas antipathetic and complicating. He went on after
+      his last parting from Amanda into China, it was the first of several
+      visits to China, and thence he crossed to America. White found a number of
+      American press-cuttings of a vehemently anti-Japanese quality still
+      awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it was clear to him that Benham had
+      given a considerable amount of attention to the development of the &ldquo;white&rdquo;
+       and &ldquo;yellow&rdquo; race hostility on the Pacific slope; but his chief interest
+      at that time had been the negro. He went to Washington and thence south;
+      he visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at a tangent to Hayti.
+      He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid book, WHERE BLACK RULES
+      WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able to visit that wonderful
+      monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La Ferriere, the citadel
+      built a century ago by the &ldquo;Black Napoleon,&rdquo; the Emperor Christophe. He
+      went with a young American demonstrator from Harvard.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      4
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a memorable excursion. They rode from Cap Haytien for a day's
+      journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of luxurious
+      vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of unbridled jungle with
+      populous country. They passed countless villages of thatched huts alive
+      with curiosity and swarming with naked black children, and yet all the
+      time they seemed to be in a wilderness. They forded rivers, they had at
+      times to force themselves through thickets, once or twice they lost their
+      way, and always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great mountain peak
+      with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the background until it
+      dominated the landscape. Long after dark they blundered upon rather than
+      came to the village at its foot where they were to pass the night. They
+      were interrogated under a flaring torch by peering ragged black soldiers,
+      and passed through a firelit crowd into the presence of the local
+      commandant to dispute volubly about their right to go further. They might
+      have been in some remote corner of Nigeria. Their papers, laboriously got
+      in order, were vitiated by the fact, which only became apparent by
+      degrees, that the commandant could not read. They carried their point with
+      difficulty.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But they carried their point, and, watched and guarded by a hungry
+      half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of trousers,
+      they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of imperialism that
+      humanity has ever made. The roads and parks and prospects constructed by
+      this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long since disappeared, and the three
+      men clambered for hours up ravines and precipitous jungle tracks,
+      occasionally crossing the winding traces of a choked and ruined road that
+      had once been the lordly approach to his fastness. Below they passed an
+      abandoned palace of vast extent, a palace with great terraces and the
+      still traceable outline of gardens, though there were green things pushing
+      between the terrace steps, and trees thrust out of the empty windows. Here
+      from a belvedere of which the skull-like vestige still remained, the negro
+      Emperor Christophe, after fourteen years of absolute rule, had watched for
+      a time the smoke of the burning of his cane-fields in the plain below, and
+      then, learning that his bodyguard had deserted him, had gone in and blown
+      out his brains.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He had christened the place after the best of examples, &ldquo;Sans Souci.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he never
+      used. The defection of his guards made him abandon that. To build it, they
+      say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives. He had the true Imperial
+      lavishness. So high it was, so lost in a wilderness of trees and bush,
+      looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch
+      and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky&mdash;for even the
+      guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in
+      its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside its walls&mdash;and at
+      the same time so huge and grandiose&mdash;there were walls thirty feet
+      thick, galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls,
+      king's apartments and queen's apartments, towering battlements and great
+      arched doorways&mdash;that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and
+      passing of that miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing of
+      multitudes before one man and the transitoriness of such glories, more
+      completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world before.
+      Beneath the battlements&mdash;they are choked above with jungle grass and
+      tamarinds and many flowery weeds&mdash;the precipice fell away a sheer two
+      thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain populous and
+      diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an amethystine wall.
+      Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling his victims, and below
+      this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons where men, broken and torn,
+      thrust in at the neck-like hole above, starved and died: it was his
+      headquarters here, here he had his torture chambers and the means for
+      nameless cruelties....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Not a hundred years ago,&rdquo; said Benham's companion, and told the story of
+      the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Leap,&rdquo; said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one
+      questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last gesture
+      of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed, and with a
+      convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down through the shimmering
+      air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Came presently the little faint sound of his fall.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this
+      projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and
+      presently struggled and found itself still a living man. It could scramble
+      down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for mercy. An hour and
+      it stood before Christophe again, with an arm broken and bloody and a face
+      torn, a battered thing now but with a faint flavour of pride in its
+      bearing. &ldquo;Your bidding has been done, Sire,&rdquo; it said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;So,&rdquo; said the Emperor, unappeased. &ldquo;And you live? Well&mdash; Leap
+      again....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then came other stories. The young man told them as he had heard them,
+      stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men standing along the walls
+      of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by one as the feast went on, of
+      exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and his one note of wonder, his
+      refrain was, &ldquo;HERE! Not a hundred years ago.... It makes one almost
+      believe that somewhere things of this sort are being done now.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins. The lizards
+      which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the sunshine. The
+      soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his black fingers in the
+      ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a search for some saleable
+      memento....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sat musing in silence. The thought of deliberate cruelty was always
+      an actual physical distress to him. He sat bathed in the dreamy afternoon
+      sunlight and struggled against the pictures that crowded into his mind,
+      pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-driven men toiling in agony,
+      and of the shame of extorted obedience and of cringing and crawling black
+      figures, and the defiance of righteous hate beaten down under blow and
+      anguish. He saw eyes alight with terror and lips rolled back in agony, he
+      saw weary hopeless flight before striding proud destruction, he saw the
+      poor trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in his soul....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride, and then
+      the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes Christophes but
+      humility.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There is in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his
+      superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking
+      individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience. Every natural sane
+      man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a definite
+      direction for his own partial life. At the bottom of his heart he feels,
+      even if he does not know it definitely, that his life is partial. He is
+      driven to join himself on. He obeys decision and the appearance of
+      strength as a horse obeys its rider's voice. One thinks of the pride, the
+      uncontrolled frantic will of this black ape of all Emperors, and one
+      forgets the universal docility that made him possible. Usurpation is a
+      crime to which men are tempted by human dirigibility. It is the orderly
+      peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much restraint above as stiff
+      insubordination below that has to be taught to men. There are kings and
+      tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of the unkingliness of men.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, Benham cast off from
+      his mind his last tolerance for earthly kings and existing States, and
+      expounded to another human being for the first time this long-cherished
+      doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is the lord of human destiny,
+      the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the sceptre and rule the
+      earth.... To the young American's naive American response to any simply
+      felt emotion, he seemed with his white earnestness and his glowing eyes a
+      veritable prophet....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;This is the root idea of aristocracy,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I have never heard the underlying spirit of democracy, the real true
+      Thing in democracy, so thoroughly expressed,&rdquo; said the young American.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      5
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's notes on race and racial cultures gave White tantalizing glimpses
+      of a number of picturesque experiences. The adventure in Kieff had first
+      roused Benham to the reality of racial quality. He was caught in the
+      wheels of a pogrom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before that time I had been disposed to minimize and deny race. I still
+      think it need not prevent men from the completest social co-operation, but
+      I see now better than I did how difficult it is for any man to purge from
+      his mind the idea that he is not primarily a Jew, a Teuton, or a Kelt, but
+      a man. You can persuade any one in five minutes that he or she belongs to
+      some special and blessed and privileged sort of human being; it takes a
+      lifetime to destroy that persuasion. There are these confounded
+      differences of colour, of eye and brow, of nose or hair, small differences
+      in themselves except that they give a foothold and foundation for
+      tremendous fortifications of prejudice and tradition, in which hostilities
+      and hatreds may gather. When I think of a Jew's nose, a Chinaman's eyes or
+      a negro's colour I am reminded of that fatal little pit which nature has
+      left in the vermiform appendix, a thing no use in itself and of no
+      significance, but a gathering-place for mischief. The extremest case of
+      race-feeling is the Jewish case, and even here, I am convinced, it is the
+      Bible and the Talmud and the exertions of those inevitable professional
+      champions who live upon racial feeling, far more than their common
+      distinction of blood, which holds this people together banded against
+      mankind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Between the lines of such general propositions as this White read little
+      scraps of intimation that linked with the things Benham let fall in
+      Johannesburg to reconstruct the Kieff adventure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had been visiting a friend in the country on the further side of
+      the Dnieper. As they drove back along dusty stretches of road amidst
+      fields of corn and sunflower and through bright little villages, they saw
+      against the evening blue under the full moon a smoky red glare rising from
+      amidst the white houses and dark trees of the town. &ldquo;The pogrom's begun,&rdquo;
+       said Benham's friend, and was surprised when Benham wanted to end a
+      pleasant day by going to see what happens after the beginning of a pogrom.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He was to have several surprises before at last he left Benham in disgust
+      and went home by himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For Benham, with that hastiness that so flouted his exalted theories,
+      passed rapidly from an attitude of impartial enquiry to active
+      intervention. The two men left their carriage and plunged into the network
+      of unlovely dark streets in which the Jews and traders harboured....
+      Benham's first intervention was on behalf of a crouching and yelping
+      bundle of humanity that was being dragged about and kicked at a street
+      corner. The bundle resolved itself into a filthy little old man, and made
+      off with extraordinary rapidity, while Benham remonstrated with the
+      kickers. Benham's tallness, his very Gentile face, his good clothes, and
+      an air of tense authority about him had its effect, and the kickers
+      shuffled off with remarks that were partly apologies. But Benham's friend
+      revolted. This was no business of theirs.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham went on unaccompanied towards the glare of the burning houses.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For a time he watched. Black figures moved between him and the glare, and
+      he tried to find out the exact nature of the conflict by enquiries in
+      clumsy Russian. He was told that the Jews had insulted a religious
+      procession, that a Jew had spat at an ikon, that the shop of a cheating
+      Jew trader had been set on fire, and that the blaze had spread to the
+      adjacent group of houses. He gathered that the Jews were running out of
+      the burning block on the other side &ldquo;like rats.&rdquo; The crowd was mostly
+      composed of town roughs with a sprinkling of peasants. They were
+      mischievous but undecided. Among them were a number of soldiers, and he
+      was surprised to see a policemen, brightly lit from head to foot, watching
+      the looting of a shop that was still untouched by the flames.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He held back some men who had discovered a couple of women's figures
+      slinking along in the shadow beneath a wall. Behind his remonstrances the
+      Jewesses escaped. His anger against disorder was growing upon him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late that night Benham found himself the leading figure amidst a party of
+      Jews who had made a counter attack upon a gang of roughs in a court that
+      had become the refuge of a crowd of fugitives. Some of the young Jewish
+      men had already been making a fight, rather a poor and hopeless fight,
+      from the windows of the house near the entrance of the court, but it is
+      doubtful if they would have made an effective resistance if it had not
+      been for this tall excited stranger who was suddenly shouting directions
+      to them in sympathetically murdered Russian. It was not that he brought
+      powerful blows or subtle strategy to their assistance, but that he put
+      heart into them and perplexity into his adversaries because he was so
+      manifestly non-partizan. Nobody could ever have mistaken Benham for a Jew.
+      When at last towards dawn a not too zealous governor called out the troops
+      and began to clear the streets of rioters, Benham and a band of Jews were
+      still keeping the gateway of that court behind a hasty but adequate
+      barricade of furniture and handbarrows.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The ghetto could not understand him, nobody could understand him, but it
+      was clear a rare and precious visitor had come to their rescue, and he was
+      implored by a number of elderly, dirty, but very intelligent-looking old
+      men to stay with them and preserve them until their safety was assured.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      They could not understand him, but they did their utmost to entertain him
+      and assure him of their gratitude. They seemed to consider him as a
+      representative of the British Government, and foreign intervention on
+      their behalf is one of those unfortunate fixed ideas that no persecuted
+      Jews seem able to abandon.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham found himself, refreshed and tended, sitting beside a wood fire in
+      an inner chamber richly flavoured by humanity and listening to a discourse
+      in evil but understandable German. It was a discourse upon the wrongs and
+      the greatness of the Jewish people&mdash;and it was delivered by a compact
+      middle-aged man with a big black beard and long-lashed but animated eyes.
+      Beside him a very old man dozed and nodded approval. A number of other men
+      crowded the apartment, including several who had helped to hold off the
+      rioters from the court. Some could follow the talk and ever again endorsed
+      the speaker in Yiddish or Russian; others listened with tantalized
+      expressions, their brows knit, their lips moving.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a discourse Benham had provoked. For now he was at the very heart
+      of the Jewish question, and he could get some light upon the mystery of
+      this great hatred at first hand. He did not want to hear tales of
+      outrages, of such things he knew, but he wanted to understand what was the
+      irritation that caused these things.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      So he listened. The Jew dilated at first on the harmlessness and
+      usefulness of the Jews.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But do you never take a certain advantage?&rdquo; Benham threw out.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The Jews are cleverer than the Russians. Must we suffer for that?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The spokesman went on to the more positive virtues of his race. Benham
+      suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling of the Gentile who finds a bill
+      being made against him. Did the world owe Israel nothing for Philo, Aron
+      ben Asher, Solomon Gabriol, Halevy, Mendelssohn, Heine, Meyerbeer,
+      Rubinstein, Joachim, Zangwill? Does Britain owe nothing to Lord
+      Beaconsfield, Montefiore or the Rothschilds? Can France repudiate her debt
+      to Fould, Gaudahaux, Oppert, or Germany to Furst, Steinschneider,
+      Herxheimer, Lasker, Auerbach, Traube and Lazarus and Benfey?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham admitted under the pressure of urgent tones and gestures that these
+      names did undoubtedly include the cream of humanity, but was it not true
+      that the Jews did press a little financially upon the inferior peoples
+      whose lands they honoured in their exile?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The man with the black beard took up the challenge bravely.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;They are merciful creditors,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;And it is their genius to possess
+      and control. What better stewards could you find for the wealth of nations
+      than the Jews? And for the honours? That always had been the role of the
+      Jews&mdash;stewardship. Since the days of Joseph in Egypt....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then in a lower voice he went on to speak of the deficiencies of the
+      Gentile population. He wished to be just and generous but the truth was
+      the truth. The Christian Russians loved drink and laziness; they had no
+      sense of property; were it not for unjust laws even now the Jews would
+      possess all the land of South Russia....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham listened with a kind of fascination. &ldquo;But,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was so. And with a confidence that aroused a protest or so from the
+      onlookers, the Jewish apologist suddenly rose up, opened a safe close
+      beside the fire and produced an armful of documents.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Look!&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;all over South Russia there are these!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was a little slow to understand, until half a dozen of these papers
+      had been thrust into his hand. Eager fingers pointed, and several voices
+      spoke. These things were illegalities that might some day be legal; there
+      were the records of loans and hidden transactions that might at any time
+      put all the surrounding soil into the hands of the Jew. All South Russia
+      was mortgaged....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But is it so?&rdquo; asked Benham, and for a time ceased to listen and stared
+      into the fire.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he held up the papers in his hand to secure silence and, feeling his
+      way in unaccustomed German, began to speak and continued to speak in spite
+      of a constant insurgent undertone of interruption from the Jewish
+      spokesman.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      All men, Benham said, were brothers. Did they not remember Nathan the
+      Wise?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I did not claim him,&rdquo; said the spokesman, misunderstanding. &ldquo;He is a
+      character in fiction.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But all men are brothers, Benham maintained. They had to be merciful to
+      one another and give their gifts freely to one another. Also they had to
+      consider each other's weaknesses. The Jews were probably justified in
+      securing and administering the property of every community into which they
+      came, they were no doubt right in claiming to be best fitted for that
+      task, but also they had to consider, perhaps more than they did, the
+      feelings and vanities of the host population into which they brought these
+      beneficent activities. What was said of the ignorance, incapacity and vice
+      of the Roumanians and Russians was very generally believed and accepted,
+      but it did not alter the fact that the peasant, for all his incapacity,
+      did like to imagine he owned his own patch and hovel and did have a
+      curious irrational hatred of debt....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The faces about Benham looked perplexed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;THIS,&rdquo; said Benham, tapping the papers in his hand. &ldquo;They will not
+      understand the ultimate benefit of it. It will be a source of anger and
+      fresh hostility. It does not follow because your race has supreme
+      financial genius that you must always follow its dictates to the exclusion
+      of other considerations....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The perplexity increased.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham felt he must be more general. He went on to emphasize the
+      brotherhood of man, the right to equal opportunity, equal privilege,
+      freedom to develop their idiosyncrasies as far as possible, unhindered by
+      the idiosyncrasies of others. He could feel the sympathy and understanding
+      of his hearers returning. &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;you must have
+      generosity. You must forget ancient scores. Do you not see the world must
+      make a fresh beginning?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He was entirely convinced he had them with him. The heads nodded assent,
+      the bright eyes and lips followed the slow disentanglement of his bad
+      German.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Free yourselves and the world,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Applause.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And so,&rdquo; he said breaking unconsciously into English, &ldquo;let us begin by
+      burning these BEASTLY mortgages!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the fire.
+      The assenting faces became masks of horror. A score of hands clutched at
+      those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger filled the room.
+      Some one caught at his throat from behind. &ldquo;Don't kill him!&rdquo; cried some
+      one. &ldquo;He fought for us!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      6
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled and
+      battered condition to his hotel. He found his friend in anxious
+      consultation with the hotel proprietor.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We were afraid that something had happened to you,&rdquo; said his friend.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I got a little involved,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Hasn't some one clawed your cheek?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Very probably,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And torn your coat? And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was a complicated misunderstanding,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Oh! pardon! I'm
+      rather badly bruised upon that arm you're holding.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      7
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my point of
+      view,&rdquo; he said....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm not sure if they quite followed my German....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's odd, too, that I remember saying, 'Let's burn these mortgages,' and
+      at the time I'm almost sure I didn't know the German for mortgage....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to grasp the
+      full intention behind Benham's proceedings. His aristocratic impulses were
+      apt to run away with his conceptions of brotherhood, and time after time
+      it was only too manifest to White that Benham's pallid flash of anger had
+      astonished the subjects of his disinterested observations extremely. His
+      explorations in Hayti had been terminated abruptly by an affair with a
+      native policeman that had necessitated the intervention of the British
+      Consul. It was begun with that suddenness that was too often
+      characteristic of Benham, by his hitting the policeman. It was in the main
+      street of Cap Haytien, and the policeman had just clubbed an unfortunate
+      youth over the head with the heavily loaded wooden club which is the
+      normal instrument of Haytien discipline. His blow was a repartee, part of
+      a triangular altercation in which a large, voluble, mahogany-coloured lady
+      whose head was tied up in a blue handkerchief played a conspicuous part,
+      but it seemed to Benham an entirely unjustifiable blow.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had been
+      gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince to carry
+      him away. He advanced with the kind of shout one would hurl at a dog, and
+      smote the policeman to the earth with the stout stick that the peculiar
+      social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him to carry. By the local
+      standard his blow was probably a trivial one, but the moral effect of his
+      indignant pallor and a sort of rearing tallness about him on these
+      occasions was always very considerable. Unhappily these characteristics
+      could have no effect on a second negro policeman who was approaching the
+      affray from behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on the shoulder that
+      was meant for the head, and with the assistance of his colleague
+      overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to the
+      lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer's superior
+      knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his British
+      citizenship.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German gunboat was
+      still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed it that in spite of
+      his blank refusal to compensate the man he had knocked over, he was after
+      two days of anger, two days of extreme insanitary experience, and much
+      meditation upon his unphilosophical hastiness, released.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified his
+      enquiries into Indian conditions. They too turned for the most part on his
+      facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt desire for human
+      brotherhood. At last indeed came an affair that refused ultimately to
+      remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil that invoked newspaper
+      articles and heated controversies.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
+      attraction and irritation. He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
+      intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
+      infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India into
+      a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to the other.
+      &ldquo;I came to see India,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;and there is no India. There is a great
+      number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin in the air, quietly
+      scorning everybody else.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste began with
+      a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had turned an Indian
+      gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and culminated in a
+      disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness at Benares, who had
+      thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham's shadow
+      had fallen upon it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You unendurable snob!&rdquo; said Benham, and then lapsing into the forceful
+      and inadvisable: &ldquo;By Heaven, you SHALL eat it!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      8
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep in his
+      character as to seem almost instinctive. But he had too a very clear
+      reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in human continuity
+      in his sense of the gathering dangers they now involve. They had always,
+      he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and the destruction of
+      human dignity, but the new conditions of life that have been brought about
+      by modern science were making them far more dangerous than they had ever
+      been before. He believed that the evil and horror of war was becoming more
+      and more tremendous with every decade, and that the free play of national
+      prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness that seems to be
+      inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate catastrophe, unless a
+      real international aristocracy could be brought into being to prevent it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the drawer full of papers labelled &ldquo;Politics,&rdquo; White found a paper
+      called &ldquo;The Metal Beast.&rdquo; It showed that for a time Benham had been
+      greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were in those days
+      piling up in every country in Europe. He had gone to Essen, and at Essen
+      he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great guns that
+      were presently to smash the effete British fleet and open the Imperial way
+      to London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I could not sleep,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;on account of this man and his talk and
+      the streak of hatred in his talk. He distressed me not because he seemed
+      exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary. I realized that he was more
+      human than I was, and that only killing and killing could come out of such
+      humanity. I thought of the great ugly guns I had seen, and of the still
+      greater guns he had talked about, and how gloatingly he thought of the
+      destruction they could do. I felt as I used to feel about that infernal
+      stallion that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a despairing fear,
+      a sense of monstrosity in life. And this creature who had so disturbed me
+      was only a beastly snuffy little man in an ill-fitting frock-coat, who
+      laid his knife and fork by their tips on the edge of his plate, and picked
+      his teeth with gusto and breathed into my face as he talked to me. The
+      commonest of representative men. I went about that Westphalian country
+      after that, with the conviction that headless, soulless, blood-drinking
+      metal monsters were breeding all about me. I felt that science was
+      producing a poisonous swarm, a nest of black dragons. They were crouching
+      here and away there in France and England, they were crouching like beasts
+      that bide their time, mewed up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in
+      tarpaulins as hawks are hooded.... And I had never thought very much about
+      them before, and there they were, waiting until some human fool like that
+      frock-coated thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million,
+      saw fit to call them out to action. Just out of hatred and nationalism and
+      faction....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then came a queer fancy.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see it more
+      and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for the happiness
+      of life. It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous plot of the rebel
+      metals against sensation. That is why in particular half-living people
+      seem to love these things. La Ferriere was a fastness of the kind of
+      tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny of the strong man
+      over men. Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of the strong
+      machine....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Science is either slave or master. These people&mdash;I mean the German
+      people and militarist people generally&mdash;have no real mastery over the
+      scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride. The monster of
+      steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive. It has
+      persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they must follow the logic
+      of its path. Whither?... Only kingship will ever master that beast of
+      steel which has got loose into the world. Nothing but the sense of
+      unconquerable kingship in us all will ever dare withstand it.... Men must
+      be kingly aristocrats&mdash;it isn't MAY be now, it is MUST be&mdash;or,
+      these confederated metals, these things of chemistry and metallurgy, these
+      explosives and mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of our race
+      into mere red-streaked froth and filth....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast's release. Would it
+      ever be given blood?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great war
+      that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is with a
+      note of incredulity that one tells oneself, 'After all this war may
+      happen. But can it happen?'&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war would
+      ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident to White that
+      he wanted very much to persuade himself against that idea. It was too
+      disagreeable for him to think it probable. The paper was dated 1910. It
+      was in October, 1914, that White, who was still working upon the laborious
+      uncertain account of Benham's life and thought he has recently published,
+      read what Benham had written. Benham concluded that the common-sense of
+      the world would hold up this danger until reason could get &ldquo;to the head of
+      things.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;There are already mighty forces in Germany,&rdquo; Benham wrote, &ldquo;that will
+      struggle very powerfully to avoid a war. And these forces increase. Behind
+      the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama and the display of the
+      vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble people.... I have talked with
+      Germans of the better kind.... You cannot have a whole nation of
+      Christophes.... There also the true knighthood discovers itself.... I do
+      not believe this war will overtake us.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;WELL!&rdquo; said White.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better,&rdquo; the notes went
+      on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve. Other things
+      were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was too late for
+      them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over Europe,
+      because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the blood of a people,
+      because a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled.... Does no one see
+      what that metallic beast will do if they once let it loose? It will
+      trample cities; it will devour nations....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      White read this on the 9th of October, 1914. One crumpled evening paper at
+      his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: &ldquo;Rain of Incendiary Shells.
+      Antwerp Ablaze.&rdquo; Another declared untruthfully but impressively: &ldquo;Six
+      Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and
+      turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no
+      data at all&mdash;as every one did at that time&mdash;before he was able
+      to go on with Benham's manuscripts.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like
+      finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between the
+      pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a
+      heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;How can we ever begin over again?&rdquo; said White, and sat for a long time
+      staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too that
+      men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to succeed
+      them....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We have to begin over again,&rdquo; said White at last, and took up Benham's
+      papers where he had laid them down....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      9
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth Limitation
+      was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position. This
+      section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the
+      psychology of economic organization....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important part
+      played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of human
+      affairs. This was a very natural result of his peculiar social
+      circumstances. Most people born to wealth and ease take the established
+      industrial system as the natural method in human affairs; it is only very
+      reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and disinterestedness that they
+      can be brought to realize that it is natural only in the sense that it has
+      grown up and come about, and necessary only because nobody is strong and
+      clever enough to rearrange it. Their experience of it is a satisfactory
+      experience. On the other hand, the better off one is, the wider is one's
+      outlook and the more alert one is to see the risks and dangers of
+      international dissensions. Travel and talk to foreigners open one's eyes
+      to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become conceivable.
+      It is in the nature of things that socialists and labour parties should
+      minimize international obligations and necessities, and equally so that
+      autocracies and aristocracies and plutocracies should be negligent of and
+      impatient about social reform.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker and
+      director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful humanity and
+      enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned opportunity. It is a far
+      profounder and subtler conflict than any other in human affairs. &ldquo;I can
+      foresee a time,&rdquo; he wrote, &ldquo;when the greater national and racial hatreds
+      may all be so weakened as to be no longer a considerable source of human
+      limitation and misery, when the suspicions of complexion and language and
+      social habit are allayed, and when the element of hatred and aggression
+      may be clean washed out of most religious cults, but I do not begin to
+      imagine a time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there will not be
+      great friction between those who employ, those who direct collective
+      action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in
+      industrialism. This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due very
+      largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort of
+      organization. Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass and
+      self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so deeply seated,
+      so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be cheerfully obedient and
+      modestly directive in war time, there is no reason why ultimately they
+      should not be so in the business of peace. But I do not understand the
+      elements of the methods by which this state of affairs can be brought
+      about.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If I were to confess this much to an intelligent working man I know that
+      at once he would answer 'Socialism,' but Socialism is no more a solution
+      of this problem than eating is a solution when one is lost in the
+      wilderness and hungry. Of course everybody with any intelligence wants
+      Socialism, everybody, that is to say, wants to see all human efforts
+      directed to the common good and a common end, but brought face to face
+      with practical problems Socialism betrays a vast insufficiency of
+      practical suggestions. I do not say that Socialism would not work, but I
+      do say that so far Socialists have failed to convince me that they could
+      work it. The substitution of a stupid official for a greedy proprietor may
+      mean a vanished dividend, a limited output and no other human advantage
+      whatever. Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent gesture, inspiring,
+      encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not very helpful, towards the vast
+      problem of moral and material adjustment before the race. That problem is
+      incurably miscellaneous and intricate, and only by great multitudes of
+      generous workers, one working at this point and one at that, secretly
+      devoted knights of humanity, hidden and dispersed kings, unaware of one
+      another, doubting each his right to count himself among those who do these
+      kingly services, is this elaborate rightening of work and guidance to be
+      done.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      So from these most fundamental social difficulties he came back to his
+      panacea. All paths and all enquiries led him back to his conception of
+      aristocracy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted, self-examining yet
+      secret, making no personal nor class pretences, as the supreme need not
+      only of the individual but the world.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      10
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal which had brought the two
+      schoolfellows together again. White had been on his way to Zimbabwe. An
+      emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had driven him to seek
+      consolations in strange scenery and mysterious desolations. It was as if
+      Zimbabwe called to him. Benham had come to South Africa to see into the
+      question of Indian immigration, and he was now on his way to meet Amanda
+      in London. Neither man had given much heed to the gathering social
+      conflict on the Rand until the storm burst about them. There had been a
+      few paragraphs in the papers about a dispute upon a point of labour
+      etiquette, a question of the recognition of Trade Union officials, a thing
+      that impressed them both as technical, and then suddenly a long incubated
+      quarrel flared out in rioting and violence, the burning of houses and
+      furniture, attacks on mines, attempts to dynamite trains. White stayed in
+      Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded up country by the
+      railway strike that was among the possibilities of the situation. Benham
+      stayed because he was going to London very reluctantly, and he was glad of
+      this justification for a few days' delay. The two men found themselves
+      occupying adjacent tables in the Sherborough Hotel, and White was the
+      first to recognize the other. They came together with a warmth and
+      readiness of intimacy that neither would have displayed in London.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White had not seen Benham since the social days of Amanda at Lancaster
+      Gate, and he was astonished at the change a few years had made in him. The
+      peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair had become more marked,
+      his skin was deader, his features seemed more prominent and his expression
+      intenser. His eyes were very bright and more sunken under his brows. He
+      had suffered from yellow fever in the West Indies, and these it seemed
+      were the marks left by that illness. And he was much more detached from
+      the people about him; less attentive to the small incidents of life, more
+      occupied with inner things. He greeted White with a confidence that White
+      was one day to remember as pathetic.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It is good to meet an old friend,&rdquo; Benham said. &ldquo;I have lost friends. And
+      I do not make fresh ones. I go about too much by myself, and I do not
+      follow the same tracks that other people are following....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      What track was he following? It was now that White first heard of the
+      Research Magnificent. He wanted to know what Benham was doing, and Benham
+      after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his interest in
+      insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions. &ldquo;It is, of course, a
+      part of something else,&rdquo; he amplified. He was writing a book, &ldquo;an enormous
+      sort of book.&rdquo; He laughed with a touch of shyness. It was about
+      &ldquo;everything,&rdquo; about how to live and how not to live. And &ldquo;aristocracy, and
+      all sorts of things.&rdquo; White was always curious about other people's books.
+      Benham became earnest and more explicit under encouragement, and to talk
+      about his book was soon to talk about himself. In various ways,
+      intentionally and inadvertently, he told White much. These chance
+      encounters, these intimacies of the train and hotel, will lead men at
+      times to a stark frankness of statement they would never permit themselves
+      with habitual friends.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little, considering
+      how insistent it was becoming. But the wide propositions of the Research
+      Magnificent, with its large indifference to immediate occurrences, its
+      vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in
+      White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and resentment of the
+      events about them. For him the thought of that first discussion of this
+      vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was flowering, and which he
+      was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a fringe of vivid little
+      pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and afoot under a
+      lowering twilight sky towards murmuring centres of disorder, of startling
+      flares seen suddenly afar off, of the muffled galloping of troops through
+      the broad dusty street in the night, of groups of men standing and
+      watching down straight broad roads, roads that ended in groups of chimneys
+      and squat buildings of corrugated iron. And once there was a marching body
+      of white men in the foreground and a complicated wire fence, and a
+      clustering mass of Kaffirs watching them over this fence and talking
+      eagerly amongst themselves.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,&rdquo; said
+      Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt that it
+      was more than that. Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that eventful
+      background while Benham talked to him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the
+      background the greater share of his attention....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      11
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that the
+      full values came to very many things that Benham said during these last
+      conversations. The papers fitted in with his memories of their long talks
+      like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk had repeated the
+      private writings in which he had first digested his ideas that it was
+      presently almost impossible to disentangle what had been said and
+      understood at Johannesburg from the fuller statement of those patched and
+      corrected manuscripts. The two things merged in White's mind as he read.
+      The written text took upon itself a resonance of Benham's voice; it eked
+      out the hints and broken sentences of his remembered conversation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their mere
+      marked absence an impression on White's mind. And occasionally after
+      Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an occasional
+      aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men who restrain
+      themselves from betraying a preoccupation. He would say nothing about
+      Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant to speak of Prothero,
+      and another peculiarity was that he referred perhaps half a dozen times or
+      more to the idea that he was a &ldquo;prig.&rdquo; He seemed to be defending himself
+      against some inner accusation, some unconquerable doubt of the entire
+      adventure of his life. These half hints and hints by omission exercised
+      the quick intuitions of White's mind very keenly, and he drew far closer
+      to an understanding of Benham's reserves than Benham ever suspected....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
+      completely justified in his treatment of her. She had betrayed him and he
+      had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control. He had no doubt that
+      he had punished her very effectively, and it was only after he had been
+      travelling in China with Prothero for some time and in the light of one or
+      two chance phrases in her letters that he began to have doubts whether he
+      ought to have punished her at all. And one night at Shanghai he had a
+      dream in which she stood before him, dishevelled and tearful, his Amanda,
+      very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was dirty and shameful and
+      spoilt for ever, because he had gone away from her. Afterwards the dream
+      became absurd: she showed him the black leopard's fur as though it was a
+      rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the leopard skin that had been
+      so bright and wonderful such a little time ago, and he awoke before he
+      could answer her, and for a long time he was full of unspoken answers
+      explaining that in view of her deliberate unfaithfulness the position she
+      took up was absurd. She had spoilt her own fur. But what was more
+      penetrating and distressing in this dream was not so much the case Amanda
+      stated as the atmosphere of unconquerable intimacy between them, as though
+      they still belonged to each other, soul to soul, as though nothing that
+      had happened afterwards could have destroyed their common responsibility
+      and the common interest of their first unstinted union. She was hurt, and
+      of course he was hurt. He began to see that his marriage to Amanda was
+      still infinitely more than a technical bond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether she
+      realized anything of the sort. Her letters fluctuated very much in tone,
+      but at times they were as detached and guarded as a schoolgirl writing to
+      a cousin. Then it seemed to Benham an extraordinary fraud on her part that
+      she should presume to come into his dream with an entirely deceptive
+      closeness and confidence. She began to sound him in these latter letters
+      upon the possibility of divorce. This, which he had been quite disposed to
+      concede in London, now struck him as an outrageous suggestion. He wrote to
+      ask her why, and she responded exasperatingly that she thought it was
+      &ldquo;better.&rdquo; But, again, why better? It is remarkable that although his mind
+      had habituated itself to the idea that Easton was her lover in London, her
+      thought of being divorced, no doubt to marry again, filled him with
+      jealous rage. She asked him to take the blame in the divorce proceedings.
+      There, again, he found himself ungenerous. He did not want to do that. Why
+      should he do that? As a matter of fact he was by no means reconciled to
+      the price he had paid for his Research Magnificent; he regretted his
+      Amanda acutely. He was regretting her with a regret that grew when by all
+      the rules of life it ought to be diminishing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was in consequence of that regret and his controversies with Prothero
+      while they travelled together in China that his concern about what he
+      called priggishness arose. It is a concern that one may suppose has a
+      little afflicted every reasonably self-conscious man who has turned from
+      the natural passionate personal life to religion or to public service or
+      any abstract devotion. These things that are at least more extensive than
+      the interests of flesh and blood have a trick of becoming unsubstantial,
+      they shine gloriously and inspiringly upon the imagination, they capture
+      one and isolate one and then they vanish out of sight. It is far easier to
+      be entirely faithful to friend or lover than it is to be faithful to a
+      cause or to one's country or to a religion. In the glow of one's first
+      service that larger idea may be as closely spontaneous as a handclasp, but
+      in the darkness that comes as the glow dies away there is a fearful sense
+      of unreality. It was in such dark moments that Benham was most persecuted
+      by his memories of Amanda and most distressed by this suspicion that the
+      Research Magnificent was a priggishness, a pretentious logomachy. Prothero
+      could indeed hint as much so skilfully that at times the dream of nobility
+      seemed an insult to the sunshine, to the careless laughter of children, to
+      the good light in wine and all the warm happiness of existence. And then
+      Amanda would peep out of the dusk and whisper, &ldquo;Of course if you could
+      leave me&mdash;! Was I not LIFE? Even now if you cared to come back to me&mdash;
+      For I loved you best and loved you still, old Cheetah, long after you had
+      left me to follow your dreams.... Even now I am drifting further into lies
+      and the last shreds of dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful
+      leopard I am now, who was once clean and bright.... You could come back,
+      Cheetah, and you could save me yet. If you would love me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      In certain moods she could wring his heart by such imagined speeches, the
+      very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that his ear had loved,
+      and not only could she distress him, but when Benham was in this heartache
+      mood, when once she had set him going, then his little mother also would
+      rise against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue eyes bright with
+      tears; and his frowsty father would back towards him and sit down
+      complaining that he was neglected, and even little Mrs. Skelmersdale would
+      reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking after him as he slunk away
+      from her through Kensington Gardens; indeed every personal link he had
+      ever had to life could in certain moods pull him back through the door of
+      self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching and accusing himself of
+      harshness and self-concentration. The very kittens of his childhood
+      revived forgotten moments of long-repented hardness. For a year before
+      Prothero was killed there were these heartaches. That tragedy gave them
+      their crowning justification. All these people said in this form or that,
+      &ldquo;You owed a debt to us, you evaded it, you betrayed us, you owed us life
+      out of yourself, love and services, and you have gone off from us all with
+      this life that was ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of
+      the world, and with empty phantoms of power and destiny. All this was
+      intellectualization. You sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind.
+      There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like you may lay
+      hold upon. The rule of the world is a fortuitous result of incalculably
+      multitudinous forces. But all of us you could have made happier. You could
+      have spared us distresses. Prothero died because of you. Presently it will
+      be the turn of your father, your mother&mdash;Amanda perhaps....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several memoranda
+      about priggishness that White read and came near to understanding. In
+      spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was making up his mind
+      to be a prig. He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness
+      against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate
+      sympathy for Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and he
+      made his choice. But it was a reluctant choice.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      One fragment began in the air. &ldquo;Of course I had made myself responsible
+      for her life. But it was, you see, such a confoundedly energetic life, as
+      vigorous and as slippery as an eel.... Only by giving all my strength to
+      her could I have held Amanda.... So what was the good of trying to hold
+      Amanda?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;All one's people have this sort of claim upon one. Claims made by their
+      pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and dependences. You've
+      no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom when it means
+      snapping and tearing the silly suffering tendrils they have wrapped about
+      you. The true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp, enough
+      steadiness, to be kind and right to every human being and still do the
+      work that ought to be his essential life. I see that now. It's one of the
+      things this last year or so of loneliness has made me realize; that in so
+      far as I have set out to live the aristocratic life I have failed. Instead
+      I've discovered it&mdash;and found myself out. I'm an overstrung man. I go
+      harshly and continuously for one idea. I live as I ride. I blunder through
+      my fences, I take off too soon. I've no natural ease of mind or conduct or
+      body. I am straining to keep hold of a thing too big for me and do a thing
+      beyond my ability. Only after Prothero's death was it possible for me to
+      realize the prig I have always been, first as regards him and then as
+      regards Amanda and my mother and every one. A necessary unavoidable
+      priggishness....&rdquo; I do not see how certain things can be done without
+      prigs, people, that is to say, so concentrated and specialized in interest
+      as to be a trifle inhuman, so resolved as to be rather rhetorical and
+      forced.... All things must begin with clumsiness, there is no assurance
+      about pioneers....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain
+      aristocracy.... But the very essence of aristocracy, as I conceive it, is
+      that it does not explain nor talk about itself....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;After all it doesn't matter what I am.... It's just a private vexation
+      that I haven't got where I meant to get. That does not affect the truth I
+      have to tell....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one must
+      speak the truth. I have worked out some very considerable things in my
+      research, and the time has come when I must set them out clearly and
+      plainly. That is my job anyhow. My journey to London to release Amanda
+      will be just the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my real life.
+      It will release me from my last entanglement with the fellow creatures I
+      have always failed to make happy.... It's a detail in the work.... And I
+      shall go on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical operation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's very like that. A surgical operation, and when it is over perhaps I
+      shall think no more about it.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done. So far
+      I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of living. I must
+      begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can upon the details, and,
+      presently, I shall see more clearly where other men are working to the
+      same ends....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      12
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham's expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle
+      between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble life to
+      the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and sympathy for
+      the earthliness of that inglorious little don. Although Benham insisted
+      upon the dominance of life by noble imaginations and relentless
+      reasonableness, he would never altogether abandon the materialism of life.
+      Prothero had once said to him, &ldquo;You are the advocate of the brain and I of
+      the belly. Only, only we respect each other.&rdquo; And at another time, &ldquo;You
+      fear emotions and distrust sensations. I invite them. You do not drink gin
+      because you think it would make you weep. But if I could not weep in any
+      other way I would drink gin.&rdquo; And it was under the influence of Prothero
+      that Benham turned from the haughty intellectualism, the systematized
+      superiorities and refinements, the caste marks and defensive dignities of
+      India to China, that great teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow
+      humanity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout of elevated idealism. It
+      was only very slowly that he reconciled his mind to the idea of an
+      entirely solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream. For some time as he
+      went about the world he was trying to bring himself into relationship with
+      the advanced thinkers, the liberal-minded people who seemed to promise at
+      least a mental and moral co-operation. Yet it is difficult to see what
+      co-operation was possible unless it was some sort of agreement that
+      presently they should all shout together. And it was after a certain
+      pursuit of Rabindranath Tagore, whom he met in Hampstead, that a horror of
+      perfect manners and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled from that
+      starry calm to the rich uncleanness of the most undignified fellow of
+      Trinity. And as an advocate and exponent of the richness of the lower
+      levels of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of the uttermost
+      refinements of pride, Prothero went with Benham by way of Siberia to the
+      Chinese scene.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner-table in their choice of
+      food and drink. Benham was always wary and Prothero always appreciative.
+      It peeped out in the distribution of their time, in the direction of their
+      glances. Whenever women walked about, Prothero gave way to a sort of
+      ethnological excitement. &ldquo;That girl&mdash;a wonderful racial type.&rdquo; But in
+      Moscow he was sentimental. He insisted on going again to the Cosmopolis
+      Bazaar, and when he had ascertained that Anna Alexievna had vanished and
+      left no trace he prowled the streets until the small hours.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      In the eastward train he talked intermittently of her. &ldquo;I should have
+      defied Cambridge,&rdquo; he said.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But at every stopping station he got out upon the platform ethnologically
+      alert....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Theoretically Benham was disgusted with Prothero. Really he was not
+      disgusted at all. There was something about Prothero like a sparrow, like
+      a starling, like a Scotch terrier.... These, too, are morally
+      objectionable creatures that do not disgust....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero discoursed much upon the essential goodness of Russians. He said
+      they were a people of genius, that they showed it in their faults and
+      failures just as much as in their virtues and achievements. He extolled
+      the &ldquo;germinating disorder&rdquo; of Moscow far above the &ldquo;implacable discipline&rdquo;
+       of Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a base materialist
+      people, could so maintain its attention upon precision and cleanliness.
+      Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. &ldquo;But all exaltation
+      neglects,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;No religion has ever boasted that its saints
+      were spick and span.&rdquo; This controversy raged between them in the streets
+      of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked their way through the
+      indescribable filth of Pekin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You say that all this is a fine disdain for material things,&rdquo; said
+      Benham. &ldquo;But look out there!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Apt to their argument a couple of sturdy young women came shuffling along,
+      cleaving the crowd in the narrow street by virtue of a single word and two
+      brace of pails of human ordure.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;That is not a fine disdain for material things,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;That is
+      merely individualism and unsystematic living.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;A mere phase of frankness. Only frankness is left to them now. The
+      Manchus crippled them, spoilt their roads and broke their waterways.
+      European intervention paralyses every attempt they make to establish order
+      on their own lines. In the Ming days China did not reek.... And, anyhow,
+      Benham, it's better than the silly waste of London....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And in a little while Prothero discovered that China had tried Benham and
+      found him wanting, centuries and dynasties ago.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he asked, but the ideal of
+      Confucius, the superior person, &ldquo;the son of the King&rdquo;? There you had the
+      very essence of Benham, the idea of self-examination, self-preparation
+      under a vague Theocracy. (&ldquo;Vaguer,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;for the Confucian Heaven
+      could punish and reward.&rdquo;) Even the elaborate sham modesty of the two
+      dreams was the same. Benham interrupted and protested with heat. And this
+      Confucian idea of the son of the King, Prothero insisted, had been the
+      cause of China's paralysis. &ldquo;My idea of nobility is not traditional but
+      expectant,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;After all, Confucianism has held together a
+      great pacific state far longer than any other polity has ever lasted. I'll
+      accept your Confucianism. I've not the slightest objection to finding
+      China nearer salvation than any other land. Do but turn it round so that
+      it looks to the future and not to the past, and it will be the best social
+      and political culture in the world. That, indeed, is what is happening.
+      Mix Chinese culture with American enterprise and you will have made a new
+      lead for mankind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      From that Benham drove on to discoveries. &ldquo;When a man thinks of the past
+      he concentrates on self; when he thinks of the future he radiates from
+      self. Call me a neo-Confucian; with the cone opening forward away from me,
+      instead of focussing on me....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You make me think of an extinguisher,&rdquo; said Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You know I am thinking of a focus,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;But all your thought
+      now has become caricature.... You have stopped thinking. You are fighting
+      after making up your mind....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham's prompt endorsement of his
+      Chinese identification. He had hoped it would be exasperating. He tried to
+      barb his offence. He amplified the indictment. All cultures must be judged
+      by their reaction and fatigue products, and Confucianism had produced
+      formalism, priggishness, humbug.... No doubt its ideals had had their
+      successes; they had unified China, stamped the idea of universal peace and
+      good manners upon the greatest mass of population in the world, paved the
+      way for much beautiful art and literature and living. &ldquo;But in the end, all
+      your stern orderliness, Benham,&rdquo; said Prothero, &ldquo;only leads to me. The
+      human spirit rebels against this everlasting armour on the soul. After Han
+      came T'ang. Have you never read Ling Po? There's scraps of him in English
+      in that little book you have&mdash;what is it?&mdash;the LUTE OF JADE? He
+      was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam after the Prophet. Life
+      must relax at last....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No!&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it is
+      creative, no....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven to
+      closer enquiries into Chinese thought. He tried particularly to get to
+      mental grips with English-speaking Chinese. &ldquo;We still know nothing of
+      China,&rdquo; said Prothero. &ldquo;Most of the stuff we have been told about this
+      country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle. We send merchants from
+      Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what doesn't remind them of
+      these delectable standards seems either funny to them or wicked. I admit
+      the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to speak, in the ancient characters
+      and the ancient traditions, but for all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what
+      all the rest of the world has still to find and get. When they begin to
+      speak and write in a modern way and handle modern things and break into
+      the soil they have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find just
+      how much it is behind.... Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not such
+      fools as that, but LIFE....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
+      wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
+      foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities, delirious
+      religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with loaded guns,
+      China, even more than America, develops steadily into a massive
+      possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The two men followed their associated and disconnected paths. Through
+      Benham's chance speeches and notes, White caught glimpses, as one might
+      catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that bilateral adventure. He
+      saw Benham in conversation with liberal-minded mandarins, grave-faced,
+      bald-browed persons with disciplined movements, who sat with their hands
+      thrust into their sleeves talking excellent English; while Prothero
+      pursued enquiries of an intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of a
+      more confidential type. And, presently, Prothero began to discover and
+      discuss the merits of opium.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, if one is to find the
+      solution of life's problem in the rational enjoyment of one's sensations,
+      why should one not use opium? It is art materialized. It gives tremendous
+      experiences with a minimum of exertion, and if presently its gifts
+      diminish one need but increase the quantity. Moreover, it quickens the
+      garrulous mind, and steadies the happiness of love. Across the varied
+      adventures of Benham's journey in China fell the shadow first of a
+      suspicion and then of a certainty....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The perfected and ancient vices of China wrapped about Prothero like some
+      tainted but scented robe, and all too late Benham sought to drag him away.
+      And then in a passion of disgust turned from him.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;To this,&rdquo; cried Benham, &ldquo;one comes! Save for pride and fierceness!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Better this than cruelty,&rdquo; said Prothero talking quickly and clearly
+      because of the evil thing in his veins. &ldquo;You think that you are the only
+      explorer of life, Benham, but while you toil up the mountains I board the
+      house-boat and float down the stream. For you the stars, for me the music
+      and the lanterns. You are the son of a mountaineering don, and I am a
+      Chinese philosopher of the riper school. You force yourself beyond fear of
+      pain, and I force myself beyond fear of consequences. What are we either
+      of us but children groping under the black cloak of our Maker?&mdash;who
+      will not blind us with his light. Did he not give us also these lusts, the
+      keen knife and the sweetness, these sensations that are like pineapple
+      smeared with saltpetre, like salted olives from heaven, like being flayed
+      with delight.... And did he not give us dreams fantastic beyond any lust
+      whatever? What is the good of talking? Speak to your own kind. I have
+      gone, Benham. I am lost already. There is no resisting any more, since I
+      have drugged away resistance. Why then should I come back? I know now the
+      symphonies of the exalted nerves; I can judge; and I say better lie and
+      hear them to the end than come back again to my old life, to my little
+      tin-whistle solo, my&mdash;effort! My EFFORT!... I ruin my body. I know.
+      But what of that?... I shall soon be thin and filthy. What of the
+      grape-skin when one has had the pulp?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But,&rdquo; said Benham, &ldquo;the cleanness of life!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;While I perish,&rdquo; said Prothero still more wickedly, &ldquo;I say good
+      things....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      13
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White had a vision of a great city with narrow crowded streets, hung with
+      lank banners and gay with vertical vermilion labels, and of a pleasant
+      large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, a garden set with
+      artificial stones and with beasts and men and lanterns of white porcelain,
+      a garden which overlooked this city. Here it was that Benham stayed and
+      talked with his host, a man robed in marvellous silks and subtle of speech
+      even in the European languages he used, and meanwhile Prothero, it seemed,
+      had gone down into the wickedness of the town below. It was a very great
+      town indeed, spreading for miles along the banks of a huge river, a river
+      that divided itself indolently into three shining branches so as to make
+      islands of the central portion of the place. And on this river swarmed for
+      ever a vast flotilla of ships and boats, boats in which people lived,
+      boats in which they sought pleasure, moored places of assembly,
+      high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger sampans, cargo craft, such a
+      water town in streets and lanes, endless miles of it, as no other part of
+      the world save China can display. In the daylight it was gay with
+      countless sunlit colours embroidered upon a fabric of yellow and brown, at
+      night it glittered with a hundred thousand lights that swayed and quivered
+      and were reflected quiveringly upon the black flowing waters.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger who
+      was for some reason very vividly realized by White's imagination. He was a
+      tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken cheeks that made his cheek bones
+      very prominent, and gave his thin-lipped mouth something of the geniality
+      of a skull, and the arm he thrust out of his yellow robe to hand
+      Prothero's message to Benham was lean as a pole. So he stood out in
+      White's imagination, against the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs
+      and blue haze of the great town below, and was with one exception the
+      distinctest thing in the story. The message he bore was scribbled by
+      Prothero himself in a nerveless scrawl: &ldquo;Send a hundred dollars by this
+      man. I am in a frightful fix.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage of
+      opium, and something in this message stirred his facile indignation. Twice
+      before he had had similar demands. And on the whole they had seemed to him
+      to be unreasonable demands. He was astonished that while he was sitting
+      and talking of the great world-republic of the future and the secret
+      self-directed aristocracy that would make it possible, his own friend, his
+      chosen companion, should thus, by this inglorious request and this
+      ungainly messenger, disavow him. He felt a wave of intense irritation.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;I will not.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And he was too angry to express himself in any language understandable by
+      his messenger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      His host intervened and explained after a few questions that the occasion
+      was serious. Prothero, it seemed, had been gambling.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;He is shameless. Let him do what he can.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The messenger was still reluctant to go.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And scarcely had he gone before misgivings seized Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Where IS your friend?&rdquo; asked the mandarin.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I don't know,&rdquo; said Benham.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But they will keep him! They may do all sorts of things when they find he
+      is lying to them.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Lying to them?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;About your help.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop that man,&rdquo; cried Benham suddenly realizing his mistake. But when the
+      servants went to stop the messenger their intentions were misunderstood,
+      and the man dashed through the open gate of the garden and made off down
+      the winding road.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Stop him!&rdquo; cried Benham, and started in pursuit, suddenly afraid for
+      Prothero.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The Chinese are a people of great curiosity, and a small pebble sometimes
+      starts an avalanche....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White pieced together his conception of the circles of disturbance that
+      spread out from Benham's pursuit of Prothero's flying messenger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For weeks and months the great town had been uneasy in all its ways
+      because of the insurgent spirits from the south and the disorder from the
+      north, because of endless rumours and incessant intrigue. The stupid
+      manoeuvres of one European &ldquo;power&rdquo; against another, the tactlessness of
+      missionaries, the growing Chinese disposition to meet violence and force
+      with violence and force, had fermented and brewed the possibility of an
+      outbreak. The sudden resolve of Benham to get at once to Prothero was like
+      the firing of a mine. This tall, pale-faced, incomprehensible stranger
+      charging through the narrow streets that led to the pleasure-boats in the
+      south river seemed to many a blue-clad citizen like the White Peril
+      embodied. Behind him came the attendants of the rich man up the hill; but
+      they surely were traitors to help this stranger.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Before Benham could at all realize what was happening he found his way to
+      the river-boat on which he supposed Prothero to be detained, barred by a
+      vigorous street fight. Explanations were impossible; he joined in the
+      fight.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      For three days that fight developed round the mystery of Prothero's
+      disappearance.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was a complicated struggle into which the local foreign traders on the
+      river-front and a detachment of modern drilled troops from the up-river
+      barracks were presently drawn. It was a struggle that was never clearly
+      explained, and at the end of it they found Prothero's body flung out upon
+      a waste place near a little temple on the river bank, stabbed while he was
+      asleep....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And from the broken fragments of description that Benham let fall, White
+      had an impression of him hunting for all those three days through the
+      strange places of a Chinese city, along narrow passages, over queer
+      Venetian-like bridges, through the vast spaces of empty warehouses, in the
+      incense-scented darkness of temple yards, along planks that passed to the
+      dark hulls of secret barges, in quick-flying boats that slipped
+      noiselessly among the larger craft, and sometimes he hunted alone,
+      sometimes in company, sometimes black figures struggled in the darkness
+      against dim-lit backgrounds and sometimes a swarm of shining yellow faces
+      screamed and shouted through the torn paper windows.... And then at the
+      end of this confused effect of struggle, this Chinese kinematograph film,
+      one last picture jerked into place and stopped and stood still, a white
+      wall in the sunshine come upon suddenly round a corner, a dirty flagged
+      passage and a stiff crumpled body that had for the first time an
+      inexpressive face....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      14
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sat at a table in the smoking-room of the Sherborough Hotel at
+      Johannesburg and told of these things. White watched him from an armchair.
+      And as he listened he noted again the intensification of Benham's face,
+      the darkness under his brows, the pallor of his skin, the touch of red in
+      his eyes. For there was still that red gleam in Benham's eyes; it shone
+      when he looked out of a darkness into a light. And he sat forward with his
+      arms folded under him, or moved his long lean hand about over the things
+      on the table.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;this is a sort of horror in my mind. Things like this
+      stick in my mind. I am always seeing Prothero now, and it will take years
+      to get this scar off my memory again. Once before&mdash;about a horse, I
+      had the same kind of distress. And it makes me tender, sore-minded about
+      everything. It will go, of course, in the long run, and it's just like any
+      other ache that lays hold of one. One can't cure it. One has to get along
+      with it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, but how was I to know
+      then that it was so imperative to send that money?...
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;At the time it seemed just pandering to his vices....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I was angry. I shall never subdue that kind of hastiness altogether. It
+      takes me by surprise. Before the messenger was out of sight I had
+      repented....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I failed him. I have gone about in the world dreaming of tremendous
+      things and failing most people. My wife too....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stopped talking for a little time and folded his arms tight and stared
+      hard in front of himself, his lips compressed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;You see, White,&rdquo; he said, with a kind of setting of the teeth, &ldquo;this is
+      the sort of thing one has to stand. Life is imperfect. Nothing can be done
+      perfectly. And on the whole&mdash;&rdquo; He spoke still more slowly, &ldquo;I would
+      go through again with the very same things that have hurt my people. If I
+      had to live over again. I would try to do the things without hurting the
+      people, but I would do the things anyhow. Because I'm raw with remorse, it
+      does not follow that on the whole I am not doing right. Right doing isn't
+      balm. If I could have contrived not to hurt these people as I have done,
+      it would have been better, just as it would be better to win a battle
+      without any killed or wounded. I was clumsy with them and they suffered, I
+      suffer for their suffering, but still I have to stick to the way I have
+      taken. One's blunders are accidents. If one thing is clearer than another
+      it is that the world isn't accident-proof....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But I wish I had sent those dollars to Prothero.... God! White, but I lie
+      awake at night thinking of that messenger as he turned away.... Trying to
+      stop him....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I didn't send those dollars. So fifty or sixty people were killed and
+      many wounded.... There for all practical purposes the thing ends. Perhaps
+      it will serve to give me a little charity for some other fool's haste and
+      blundering....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I couldn't help it, White. I couldn't help it....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes on. One thinks, one learns,
+      one adds one's contribution of experience and understanding. The spirit of
+      the race goes on to light and comprehension. In spite of accidents. In
+      spite of individual blundering.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that nobility is so easy as to come
+      slick and true on every occasion....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If one gives oneself to any long aim one must reckon with minor
+      disasters. This Research I undertook grows and grows. I believe in it more
+      and more. The more it asks from me the more I give to it. When I was a
+      youngster I thought the thing I wanted was just round the corner. I
+      fancied I would find out the noble life in a year or two, just what it
+      was, just where it took one, and for the rest of my life I would live it.
+      Finely. But I am just one of a multitude of men, each one going a little
+      wrong, each one achieving a little right. And the noble life is a long,
+      long way ahead.... We are working out a new way of living for mankind, a
+      new rule, a new conscience. It's no small job for all of us. There must be
+      lifetimes of building up and lifetimes of pulling down and trying again.
+      Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy.... I see myself now
+      for the little workman I am upon this tremendous undertaking. And all my
+      life hereafter goes to serve it....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend. He spoke with a grim
+      enthusiasm. &ldquo;I'm a prig. I'm a fanatic, White. But I have something clear,
+      something better worth going on with than any adventure of personal
+      relationship could possibly be....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the faith
+      that had grown up in his mind. He spoke with a touch of defiance, with the
+      tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame. &ldquo;I will tell you
+      what I believe.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow
+      development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect until
+      he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he refers his
+      life to ends and purposes beyond himself. An aristocrat must be loyal. So
+      it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must also be lucid; there it is
+      that one has at once the demand for kingship and the repudiation of all
+      existing states and kings. In this manner he had come to his idea of a
+      great world republic that must replace the little warring kingdoms of the
+      present, to the conception of an unseen kingship ruling the whole globe,
+      to his King Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth and all sane loyalty.
+      &ldquo;There,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is the link of our order, the new knighthood, the new
+      aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth. There is our Prince. He is
+      in me, he is in you; he is latent in all mankind. I have worked this out
+      and tried it and lived it, and I know that outwardly and inwardly this is
+      the way a man must live, or else be a poor thing and a base one. On great
+      occasions and small occasions I have failed myself a thousand times, but
+      no failure lasts if your faith lasts. What I have learnt, what I have
+      thought out and made sure, I want now to tell the world. Somehow I will
+      tell it, as a book I suppose, though I do not know if I shall ever be able
+      to make a book. But I have away there in London or with me here all the
+      masses of notes I have made in my search for the life that is worth while
+      living.... We who are self-appointed aristocrats, who are not ashamed of
+      kingship, must speak to one another....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;We can have no organization because organizations corrupt....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;No recognition....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But we can speak plainly....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      (As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and voices
+      of mounted police riding past the hotel.)
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But on one side your aristocracy means revolution,&rdquo; said White. &ldquo;It
+      becomes a political conspiracy.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Manifestly. An open conspiracy. It denies the king upon the stamps and
+      the flag upon the wall. It is the continual proclamation of the Republic
+      of Mankind.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      15
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The earlier phases of violence in the Rand outbreak in 1913 were manifest
+      rather in the outskirts of Johannesburg than at the centre. &ldquo;Pulling out&rdquo;
+       was going on first at this mine and then that, there were riots in Benoni,
+      attacks on strike breakers and the smashing up of a number of houses. It
+      was not until July the 4th that, with the suppression of a public meeting
+      in the market-place, Johannesburg itself became the storm centre.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham and White were present at this marketplace affair, a confused crowded
+      occasion, in which a little leaven of active men stirred through a large
+      uncertain multitude of decently dressed onlookers. The whole big square
+      was astir, a swaying crowd of men. A ramshackle platform improvised upon a
+      trolley struggled through the swarming straw hats to a street corner, and
+      there was some speaking. At first it seemed as though military men were
+      using this platform, and then it was manifestly in possession of an
+      excited knot of labour leaders with red rosettes. The military men had
+      said their say and got down. They came close by Benham, pushing their way
+      across the square. &ldquo;We've warned them,&rdquo; said one. A red flag, like some
+      misunderstood remark at a tea-party, was fitfully visible and
+      incomprehensible behind the platform. Somebody was either pitched or fell
+      off the platform. One could hear nothing from the speakers except a minute
+      bleating....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Then there were shouts that the police were charging. A number of mounted
+      men trotted into the square. The crowd began a series of short rushes that
+      opened lanes for the passage of the mounted police as they rode to and
+      fro. These men trotted through the crowd, scattering knots of people. They
+      carried pick-handles, but they did not seem to be hitting with them. It
+      became clear that they aimed at the capture of the trolley. There was only
+      a feeble struggle for the trolley; it was captured and hauled through the
+      scattered spectators in the square to the protection of a small impassive
+      body of regular cavalry at the opposite corner. Then quite a number of
+      people seemed to be getting excited and fighting. They appeared to be
+      vaguely fighting the foot-police, and the police seemed to be vaguely
+      pushing through them and dispersing them. The roof of a little one-story
+      shop became prominent as a centre of vigorous stone-throwing.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      It was no sort of battle. Merely the normal inconsecutiveness of human
+      affairs had become exaggerated and pugnacious. A meeting was being
+      prevented, and the police engaged in the operation were being pelted or
+      obstructed. Mostly people were just looking on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It amounts to nothing,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Even if they held a meeting, what
+      could happen? Why does the Government try to stop it?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The drifting and charging and a little booing went on for some time. Every
+      now and then some one clambered to a point of vantage, began a speech and
+      was pulled down by policemen. And at last across the confusion came an
+      idea, like a wind across a pond.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The strikers were to go to the Power Station.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      That had the effect of a distinct move in the game. The Power Station was
+      the centre of Johannesburg's light and energy. There if anywhere it would
+      be possible to express one's disapproval of the administration, one's
+      desire to embarrass and confute it. One could stop all sorts of things
+      from the Power Station. At any rate it was a repartee to the suppression
+      of the meeting. Everybody seemed gladdened by a definite project.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham and White went with the crowd.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the
+      scattered drift of people became congested. Gliding slowly across the mass
+      came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with even its glass
+      undamaged, and then another and another. Strikers, with the happy
+      expression of men who have found something expressive to do, were
+      escorting the trams off the street. They were being meticulously careful
+      with them. Never was there less mob violence in a riot. They walked by the
+      captured cars almost deferentially, like rough men honoured by a real
+      lady's company. And when White and Benham reached the Power House the
+      marvel grew. The rioters were already in possession and going freely over
+      the whole place, and they had injured nothing. They had stopped the
+      engines, but they had not even disabled them. Here too manifestly a
+      majority of the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is the most civilized rioting,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;It isn't rioting;
+      it's drifting. Just as things drifted in Moscow. Because nobody has the
+      rudder....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What maddens me,&rdquo; he said, &ldquo;is the democracy of the whole thing. White! I
+      HATE this modern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was there ever an
+      absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the men
+      at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the same
+      stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the conceit
+      that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just a touch of
+      aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an inkling of
+      responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all this squalor
+      and evil temper.... What does all this struggle here amount to? On one
+      side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the other; suspicion
+      everywhere....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;And you know, White, at bottom THEY ALL WANT TO BE DECENT!
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;If only they had light enough in their brains to show them how. It's such
+      a plain job they have here too, a new city, the simplest industries,
+      freedom from war, everything to make a good life for men, prosperity,
+      glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in the air. And mismanagement,
+      fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, stupidity, poison it all. A
+      squabble about working on a Saturday afternoon, a squabble embittered by
+      this universal shadow of miner's phthisis that the masters were too
+      incapable and too mean to prevent.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Oh, God!&rdquo; cried Benham, &ldquo;when will men be princes and take hold of life?
+      When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own?... Look at this
+      place! Look at this place!... The easy, accessible happiness! The manifest
+      prosperity. The newness and the sunshine. And the silly bitterness, the
+      rage, the mischief and miseries!...&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And then: &ldquo;It's not our quarrel....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides. Life is
+      one long struggle against the incidental. I can feel my anger gathering
+      against the Government here in spite of my reason. I want to go and
+      expostulate. I have a ridiculous idea that I ought to go off to Lord
+      Gladstone or Botha and expostulate.... What good would it do? They move in
+      the magic circles of their own limitations, an official, a politician&mdash;how
+      would they put it?&mdash;'with many things to consider....'
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It's my weakness to be drawn into quarrels. It's a thing I have to guard
+      against....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What does it all amount to? It is like a fight between navvies in a
+      tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star. It doesn't concern us....
+      Oh! it doesn't indeed concern us. It's a scuffle in the darkness, and our
+      business, the business of all brains, the only permanent good work is to
+      light up the world.... There will be mischief and hatred here and
+      suppression and then forgetfulness, and then things will go on again, a
+      little better or a little worse....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I'm tired of this place, White, and of all such places. I'm tired of the
+      shouting and running, the beating and shooting. I'm sick of all the
+      confusions of life's experience, which tells only of one need amidst an
+      endless multitude of distresses. I've seen my fill of wars and disputes
+      and struggles. I see now how a man may grow weary at last of life and its
+      disorders, its unreal exacting disorders, its blunders and its remorse.
+      No! I want to begin upon the realities I have made for myself. For they
+      are the realities. I want to go now to some quiet corner where I can
+      polish what I have learnt, sort out my accumulations, be undisturbed by
+      these transitory symptomatic things....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;What was that boy saying? They are burning the STAR office.... Well, let
+      them....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things that
+      hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the sky and
+      the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights down side
+      streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the making of greatness
+      and a new great spirit in men. All the rest of his life, he said, must be
+      given to that. He would say his thing plainly and honestly and afterwards
+      other men would say it clearly and beautifully; here it would touch a man
+      and there it would touch a man; the Invisible King in us all would find
+      himself and know himself a little in this and a little in that, and at
+      last a day would come, when fair things and fine things would rule the
+      world and such squalor as this about them would be as impossible any more
+      for men as a Stone Age Corroboree....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Late or soon?
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham sought for some loose large measure of time.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred years or
+      ten thousand years? It will never come in our lives, White. Not soon
+      enough for that. But after that everything will be soon&mdash;when one
+      comes to death then everything is at one's fingertips&mdash;I can feel
+      that greater world I shall never see as one feels the dawn coming through
+      the last darkness....&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      16
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at lunch in
+      the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the burning of the
+      STAR office. The Sherborough dining-room was on the first floor, and the
+      Venetian window beside their table opened on to a verandah above a piazza.
+      As they talked they became aware of an excitement in the street below,
+      shouting and running and then a sound of wheels and the tramp of a body of
+      soldiers marching quickly. White stood up and looked. &ldquo;They're seizing the
+      stuff in the gunshops,&rdquo; he said, sitting down again. &ldquo;It's amazing they
+      haven't done it before.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at Mukden
+      that had won Benham's admiration....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass smashing.
+      Then more revolver shots. &ldquo;That's at the big club at the corner, I think,&rdquo;
+       said Benham and went out upon the verandah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Up and down the street mischief was afoot. Outside the Rand Club in the
+      cross street a considerable mass of people had accumulated, and was being
+      hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers. Down the street people were
+      looking in the direction of the market-place and then suddenly a rush of
+      figures flooded round the corner, first a froth of scattered individuals
+      and then a mass, a column, marching with an appearance of order and waving
+      a flag. It was a poorly disciplined body, it fringed out into a swarm of
+      sympathizers and spectators upon the side walk, and at the head of it two
+      men disputed. They seemed to be differing about the direction of the whole
+      crowd. Suddenly one smote the other with his fist, a blow that hurled him
+      sideways, and then turned with a triumphant gesture to the following
+      ranks, waving his arms in the air. He was a tall lean man, hatless and
+      collarless, greyhaired and wild-eyed. On he came, gesticulating gauntly,
+      past the hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      And then up the street something happened. Benham's attention was turned
+      round to it by a checking, by a kind of catch in the breath, on the part
+      of the advancing procession under the verandah.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The roadway beyond the club had suddenly become clear. Across it a dozen
+      soldiers had appeared and dismounted methodically and lined out, with
+      their carbines in readiness. The mounted men at the club corner had
+      vanished, and the people there had swayed about towards this new threat.
+      Quite abruptly the miscellaneous noises of the crowd ceased. Understanding
+      seized upon every one.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      These soldiers were going to fire....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The brown uniformed figures moved like automata; the rifle shots rang out
+      almost in one report....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      There was a rush in the crowd towards doorways and side streets, an
+      enquiring pause, the darting back of a number of individuals into the
+      roadway and then a derisive shouting. Nobody had been hit. The soldiers
+      had fired in the air.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is a stupid game,&rdquo; said Benham. &ldquo;Why did they fire at all?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The tall man who had led the mob had run out into the middle of the road.
+      His commando was a little disposed to assume a marginal position, and it
+      had to be reassured. He was near enough for Benham to see his face. For a
+      time it looked anxious and thoughtful. Then he seemed to jump to his
+      decision. He unbuttoned and opened his coat wide as if defying the
+      soldiers. &ldquo;Shoot,&rdquo; he bawled, &ldquo;Shoot, if you dare!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      A little uniform movement of the soldiers answered him. The small figure
+      of the officer away there was inaudible. The coat of the man below flapped
+      like the wings of a crowing cock before a breast of dirty shirt, the
+      hoarse voice cracked with excitement, &ldquo;Shoot, if you dare. Shoot, if you
+      dare! See!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Came the metallic bang of the carbines again, and in the instant the
+      leader collapsed in the road, a sprawl of clothes, hit by half a dozen
+      bullets. It was an extraordinary effect. As though the figure had been
+      deflated. It was incredible that a moment before this thing had been a
+      man, an individual, a hesitating complicated purpose.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Good God!&rdquo; cried Benham, &ldquo;but&mdash;this is horrible!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      The heap of garments lay still. The red hand that stretched out towards
+      the soldiers never twitched.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The spectacular silence broke into a confusion of sounds, women shrieked,
+      men cursed, some fled, some sought a corner from which they might still
+      see, others pressed forward. &ldquo;Go for the swine!&rdquo; bawled a voice, a third
+      volley rattled over the heads of the people, and in the road below a man
+      with a rifle halted, took aim, and answered the soldiers' fire. &ldquo;Look
+      out!&rdquo; cried White who was watching the soldiers, and ducked. &ldquo;This isn't
+      in the air!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Came a straggling volley again, like a man running a metal hammer very
+      rapidly along iron corrugations, and this time people were dropping all
+      over the road. One white-faced man not a score of yards away fell with a
+      curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for some yards with blood running
+      abundantly from his neck, and fell and never stirred again. Another went
+      down upon his back clumsily in the roadway and lay wringing his hands
+      faster and faster until suddenly with a movement like a sigh they dropped
+      inert by his side. A straw-hatted youth in a flannel suit ran and stopped
+      and ran again. He seemed to be holding something red and strange to his
+      face with both hands; above them his eyes were round and anxious. Blood
+      came out between his fingers. He went right past the hotel and stumbled
+      and suddenly sprawled headlong at the opposite corner. The majority of the
+      crowd had already vanished into doorways and side streets. But there was
+      still shouting and there was still a remnant of amazed and angry men in
+      the roadway&mdash;and one or two angry women. They were not fighting.
+      Indeed they were unarmed, but if they had had weapons now they would
+      certainly have used them.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;But this is preposterous!&rdquo; cried Benham. &ldquo;Preposterous. Those soldiers
+      are never going to shoot again! This must stop.&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stood hesitating for a moment and then turned about and dashed for the
+      staircase. &ldquo;Good Heaven!&rdquo; cried White. &ldquo;What are you going to do?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham was going to stop that conflict very much as a man might go to stop
+      a clock that is striking unwarrantably and amazingly. He was going to stop
+      it because it annoyed his sense of human dignity.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White hesitated for a moment and then followed, crying &ldquo;Benham!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      But there was no arresting this last outbreak of Benham's all too
+      impatient kingship. He pushed aside a ducking German waiter who was
+      peeping through the glass doors, and rushed out of the hotel. With a
+      gesture of authority he ran forward into the middle of the street, holding
+      up his hand, in which he still held his dinner napkin clenched like a
+      bomb. White believes firmly that Benham thought he would be able to
+      dominate everything. He shouted out something about &ldquo;Foolery!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sublime indifference to
+      current things....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      But the carbines spoke again.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against something invisible. He spun
+      right round and fell down into a sitting position. He sat looking
+      surprised.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      After one moment of blank funk White drew out his pocket handkerchief,
+      held it arm high by way of a white flag, and ran out from the piazza of
+      the hotel.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      17
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;Are you hit?&rdquo; cried White dropping to his knees and making himself as
+      compact as possible. &ldquo;Benham!&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought answered in a strange voice, a
+      whisper into which a whistling note had been mixed.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;It was stupid of me to come out here. Not my quarrel. Faults on both
+      sides. And now I can't get up. I will sit here a moment and pull myself
+      together. Perhaps I'm&mdash;I must be shot. But it seemed to come&mdash;inside
+      me.... If I should be hurt. Am I hurt?... Will you see to that book of
+      mine, White? It's odd. A kind of faintness.... What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      &ldquo;I will see after your book,&rdquo; said White and glanced at his hand because
+      it felt wet, and was astonished to discover it bright red. He forgot about
+      himself then, and the fresh flight of bullets down the street.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      The immediate effect of this blood was that he said something more about
+      the book, a promise, a definite promise. He could never recall his exact
+      words, but their intention was binding. He conveyed his absolute
+      acquiescence with Benham's wishes whatever they were. His life for that
+      moment was unreservedly at his friend's disposal....
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      White never knew if his promise was heard. Benham had stopped speaking
+      quite abruptly with that &ldquo;What?&rdquo;
+     </p>
+    <p>
+      He stared in front of him with a doubtful expression, like a man who is
+      going to be sick, and then, in an instant, every muscle seemed to give
+      way, he shuddered, his head flopped, and White held a dead man in his
+      arms.
+    </p>
+    <p>
+      THE END <br /><br />
+    </p>
+<pre xml:space="preserve">
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
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+</pre>
+  </body>
+</html>
diff --git a/old/1138.txt b/old/1138.txt
new file mode 100644
index 0000000..fc52f13
--- /dev/null
+++ b/old/1138.txt
@@ -0,0 +1,13301 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Research Magnificent
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Posting Date: August 3, 2008 [EBook #1138]
+Release Date: December, 1997
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Donald Lainson
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+
+by H. G. Wells
+
+(1915)
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+     THE PRELUDE
+
+           ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+
+
+     THE STORY
+
+       I.  THE BOY GROWS UP
+
+      II.  THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN
+
+     III.  AMANDA
+
+      IV.  THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON
+
+       V.  THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY
+
+      VI.  THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+
+
+
+
+THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+
+
+
+
+THE PRELUDE
+
+
+
+
+ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+
+
+
+1
+
+The story of William Porphyry Benham is the story of a man who was led
+into adventure by an idea. It was an idea that took possession of his
+imagination quite early in life, it grew with him and changed with him,
+it interwove at last completely with his being. His story is its story.
+It was traceably germinating in the schoolboy; it was manifestly present
+in his mind at the very last moment of his adventurous life. He belonged
+to that fortunate minority who are independent of daily necessities, so
+that he was free to go about the world under its direction. It led him
+far. It led him into situations that bordered upon the fantastic, it
+made him ridiculous, it came near to making him sublime. And this idea
+of his was of such a nature that in several aspects he could document
+it. Its logic forced him to introspection and to the making of a record.
+
+An idea that can play so large a part in a life must necessarily have
+something of the complication and protean quality of life itself. It is
+not to be stated justly in any formula, it is not to be rendered by an
+epigram. As well one might show a man's skeleton for his portrait. Yet,
+essentially, Benham's idea was simple. He had an incurable, an almost
+innate persuasion that he had to live life nobly and thoroughly. His
+commoner expression for that thorough living is "the aristocratic life."
+But by "aristocratic" he meant something very different from the
+quality of a Russian prince, let us say, or an English peer. He meant an
+intensity, a clearness.... Nobility for him was to get something out of
+his individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a splendour--it is a thing
+easier to understand than to say.
+
+One might hesitate to call this idea "innate," and yet it comes soon
+into a life when it comes at all. In Benham's case we might trace it
+back to the Day Nursery at Seagate, we might detect it stirring already
+at the petticoat stage, in various private struttings and valiant
+dreamings with a helmet of pasteboard and a white-metal sword. We have
+most of us been at least as far as that with Benham. And we have
+died like Horatius, slaying our thousands for our country, or we have
+perished at the stake or faced the levelled muskets of the firing
+party--"No, do not bandage my eyes"--because we would not betray the
+secret path that meant destruction to our city. But with Benham the
+vein was stronger, and it increased instead of fading out as he grew
+to manhood. It was less obscured by those earthy acquiescences, those
+discretions, that saving sense of proportion, which have made most of
+us so satisfactorily what we are. "Porphyry," his mother had discovered
+before he was seventeen, "is an excellent boy, a brilliant boy, but, I
+begin to see, just a little unbalanced."
+
+The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the story of him, is that.
+
+Most of us are--balanced; in spite of occasional reveries we do come to
+terms with the limitations of life, with those desires and dreams and
+discretions that, to say the least of it, qualify our nobility, we take
+refuge in our sense of humour and congratulate ourselves on a certain
+amiable freedom from priggishness or presumption, but for Benham that
+easy declension to a humorous acceptance of life as it is did not occur.
+He found his limitations soon enough; he was perpetually
+rediscovering them, but out of these interments of the spirit he rose
+again--remarkably. When we others have decided that, to be plain about
+it, we are not going to lead the noble life at all, that the thing is
+too ambitious and expensive even to attempt, we have done so because
+there were other conceptions of existence that were good enough for us,
+we decided that instead of that glorious impossible being of ourselves,
+we would figure in our own eyes as jolly fellows, or sly dogs, or sane,
+sound, capable men or brilliant successes, and so forth--practicable
+things. For Benham, exceptionally, there were not these practicable
+things. He blundered, he fell short of himself, he had--as you will
+be told--some astonishing rebuffs, but they never turned him aside for
+long. He went by nature for this preposterous idea of nobility as a
+linnet hatched in a cage will try to fly.
+
+And when he discovered--and in this he was assisted not a little by his
+friend at his elbow--when he discovered that Nobility was not the simple
+thing he had at first supposed it to be, he set himself in a mood only
+slightly disconcerted to the discovery of Nobility. When it dawned upon
+him, as it did, that one cannot be noble, so to speak, IN VACUO, he set
+himself to discover a Noble Society. He began with simple beliefs and
+fine attitudes and ended in a conscious research. If he could not get
+through by a stride, then it followed that he must get through by a
+climb. He spent the greater part of his life studying and experimenting
+in the noble possibilities of man. He never lost his absurd faith in
+that conceivable splendour. At first it was always just round the corner
+or just through the wood; to the last it seemed still but a little way
+beyond the distant mountains.
+
+For this reason this story has been called THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT. It
+was a real research, it was documented. In the rooms in Westhaven Street
+that at last were as much as one could call his home, he had accumulated
+material for--one hesitates to call it a book--let us say it was an
+analysis of, a guide to the noble life. There after his tragic death
+came his old friend White, the journalist and novelist, under a promise,
+and found these papers; he found them to the extent of a crammed
+bureau, half a score of patent files quite distended and a writing-table
+drawer-full, and he was greatly exercised to find them. They were,
+White declares, they are still after much experienced handling, an
+indigestible aggregation. On this point White is very assured. When
+Benham thought he was gathering together a book he was dreaming, White
+says. There is no book in it....
+
+Perhaps too, one might hazard, Benham was dreaming when he thought the
+noble life a human possibility. Perhaps man, like the ape and the hyaena
+and the tapeworm and many other of God's necessary but less attractive
+creatures, is not for such exalted ends. That doubt never seems to have
+got a lodgment in Benham's skull; though at times one might suppose it
+the basis of White's thought. You will find in all Benham's story,
+if only it can be properly told, now subdued, now loud and amazed and
+distressed, but always traceable, this startled, protesting question,
+"BUT WHY THE DEVIL AREN'T WE?" As though necessarily we ought to be.
+He never faltered in his persuasion that behind the dingy face of this
+world, the earthy stubbornness, the baseness and dulness of himself
+and all of us, lurked the living jewels of heaven, the light of glory,
+things unspeakable. At first it seemed to him that one had only just to
+hammer and will, and at the end, after a life of willing and hammering,
+he was still convinced there was something, something in the nature of
+an Open Sesame, perhaps a little more intricate than one had supposed
+at first, a little more difficult to secure, but still in that nature,
+which would suddenly roll open for mankind the magic cave of the
+universe, that precious cave at the heart of all things, in which one
+must believe.
+
+And then life--life would be the wonder it so perplexingly just
+isn't....
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Benham did not go about the world telling people of this consuming
+research. He was not the prophet or preacher of his idea. It was too
+living and intricate and uncertain a part of him to speak freely about.
+It was his secret self; to expose it casually would have shamed him. He
+drew all sorts of reserves about him, he wore his manifest imperfections
+turned up about him like an overcoat in bitter wind. He was content
+to be inexplicable. His thoughts led him to the conviction that this
+magnificent research could not be, any more than any other research
+can be, a solitary enterprise, but he delayed expression; in a mighty
+writing and stowing away of these papers he found a relief from the
+unpleasant urgency to confess and explain himself prematurely. So that
+White, though he knew Benham with the intimacy of an old schoolfellow
+who had renewed his friendship, and had shared his last days and been a
+witness of his death, read the sheets of manuscript often with surprise
+and with a sense of added elucidation.
+
+And, being also a trained maker of books, White as he read was more
+and more distressed that an accumulation so interesting should be so
+entirely unshaped for publication. "But this will never make a book,"
+said White with a note of personal grievance. His hasty promise in their
+last moments together had bound him, it seemed, to a task he now found
+impossible. He would have to work upon it tremendously; and even then he
+did not see how it could be done.
+
+This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a
+confession, not a diary. It was--nothing definable. It went into no
+conceivable covers. It was just, White decided, a proliferation. A vast
+proliferation. It wanted even a title. There were signs that Benham had
+intended to call it THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE, and that he had tried at some
+other time the title of AN ESSAY ON ARISTOCRACY. Moreover, it would
+seem that towards the end he had been disposed to drop the word
+"aristocratic" altogether, and adopt some such phrase as THE LARGER
+LIFE. Once it was LIFE SET FREE. He had fallen away more and more from
+nearly everything that one associates with aristocracy--at the end only
+its ideals of fearlessness and generosity remained.
+
+Of all these titles THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE seemed at first most like
+a clue to White. Benham's erratic movements, his sudden impulses, his
+angers, his unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange places, and
+his lapses into what had seemed to be pure adventurousness, could all be
+put into system with that. Before White had turned over three pages of
+the great fascicle of manuscript that was called Book Two, he had found
+the word "Bushido" written with a particularly flourishing capital
+letter and twice repeated. "That was inevitable," said White with the
+comforting regret one feels for a friend's banalities. "And it dates...
+[unreadable] this was early...."
+
+"Modern aristocracy, the new aristocracy," he read presently, "has still
+to be discovered and understood. This is the necessary next step for
+mankind. As far as possible I will discover and understand it, and as
+far as I know it I will be it. This is the essential disposition of my
+mind. God knows I have appetites and sloths and habits and blindnesses,
+but so far as it is in my power to release myself I will escape to
+this...."
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+White sat far into the night and for several nights turning over papers
+and rummaging in untidy drawers. Memories came back to him of his dead
+friend and pieced themselves together with other memories and joined
+on to scraps in this writing. Bold yet convincing guesses began to leap
+across the gaps. A story shaped itself....
+
+The story began with the schoolfellow he had known at Minchinghampton
+School.
+
+Benham had come up from his father's preparatory school at Seagate. He
+had been a boy reserved rather than florid in his acts and manners, a
+boy with a pale face, incorrigible hair and brown eyes that went dark
+and deep with excitement. Several times White had seen him excited, and
+when he was excited Benham was capable of tensely daring things. On one
+occasion he had insisted upon walking across a field in which was an
+aggressive bull. It had been put there to prevent the boys taking
+a short cut to the swimming place. It had bellowed tremendously and
+finally charged him. He had dodged it and got away; at the time it had
+seemed an immense feat to White and the others who were safely up
+the field. He had walked to the fence, risking a second charge by his
+deliberation. Then he had sat on the fence and declared his intention
+of always crossing the field so long as the bull remained there. He had
+said this with white intensity, he had stopped abruptly in mid-sentence,
+and then suddenly he had dropped to the ground, clutched the fence,
+struggled with heaving shoulders, and been sick.
+
+The combination of apparently stout heart and manifestly weak stomach
+had exercised the Minchinghampton intelligence profoundly.
+
+On one or two other occasions Benham had shown courage of the same
+rather screwed-up sort. He showed it not only in physical but in mental
+things. A boy named Prothero set a fashion of religious discussion
+in the school, and Benham, after some self-examination, professed an
+atheistical republicanism rather in the manner of Shelley. This brought
+him into open conflict with Roddles, the History Master. Roddles had
+discovered these theological controversies in some mysterious way, and
+he took upon himself to talk at Benham and Prothero. He treated them to
+the common misapplication of that fool who "hath said in his heart there
+is no God." He did not perceive there was any difference between the
+fool who says a thing in his heart and one who says it in the dormitory.
+He revived that delectable anecdote of the Eton boy who professed
+disbelief and was at once "soundly flogged" by his head master. "Years
+afterwards that boy came back to thank ----"
+
+"Gurr," said Prothero softly. "STEW--ard!"
+
+"Your turn next, Benham," whispered an orthodox controversialist.
+
+"Good Lord! I'd like to see him," said Benham with a forced loudness
+that could scarcely be ignored.
+
+The subsequent controversy led to an interview with the head. From
+it Benham emerged more whitely strung up than ever. "He said he would
+certainly swish me if I deserved it, and I said I would certainly kill
+him if he did."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"He told me to go away and think it over. Said he would preach about
+it next Sunday.... Well, a swishing isn't a likely thing anyhow. But
+I would.... There isn't a master here I'd stand a thrashing from--not
+one.... And because I choose to say what I think!... I'd run amuck."
+
+For a week or so the school was exhilarated by a vain and ill-concealed
+hope that the head might try it just to see if Benham would. It was
+tantalizingly within the bounds of possibility....
+
+These incidents came back to White's mind as he turned over the
+newspapers in the upper drawer of the bureau. The drawer was labelled
+"Fear--the First Limitation," and the material in it was evidently
+designed for the opening volume of the great unfinished book. Indeed, a
+portion of it was already arranged and written up.
+
+As White read through this manuscript he was reminded of a score of
+schoolboy discussions Benham and he and Prothero had had together. Here
+was the same old toughness of mind, a kind of intellectual hardihood,
+that had sometimes shocked his schoolfellows. Benham had been one of
+those boys who do not originate ideas very freely, but who go out to
+them with a fierce sincerity. He believed and disbelieved with emphasis.
+Prothero had first set him doubting, but it was Benham's own temperament
+took him on to denial. His youthful atheism had been a matter for secret
+consternation in White. White did not believe very much in God even
+then, but this positive disbelieving frightened him. It was going
+too far. There had been a terrible moment in the dormitory, during a
+thunderstorm, a thunderstorm so vehement that it had awakened them
+all, when Latham, the humourist and a quietly devout boy, had suddenly
+challenged Benham to deny his Maker.
+
+"NOW say you don't believe in God?"
+
+Benham sat up in bed and repeated his negative faith, while little
+Hopkins, the Bishop's son, being less certain about the accuracy of
+Providence than His aim, edged as far as he could away from Benham's
+cubicle and rolled his head in his bedclothes.
+
+"And anyhow," said Benham, when it was clear that he was not to be
+struck dead forthwith, "you show a poor idea of your God to think he'd
+kill a schoolboy for honest doubt. Even old Roddles--"
+
+"I can't listen to you," cried Latham the humourist, "I can't listen to
+you. It's--HORRIBLE."
+
+"Well, who began it?" asked Benham.
+
+A flash of lightning lit the dormitory and showed him to White
+white-faced and ablaze with excitement, sitting up with the bed-clothes
+about him. "Oh WOW!" wailed the muffled voice of little Hopkins as the
+thunder burst like a giant pistol overhead, and he buried his head still
+deeper in the bedclothes and gave way to unappeasable grief.
+
+Latham's voice came out of the darkness. "This ATHEISM that you and
+Billy Prothero have brought into the school--"
+
+He started violently at another vivid flash, and every one remained
+silent, waiting for the thunder....
+
+But White remembered no more of the controversy because he had made a
+frightful discovery that filled and blocked his mind. Every time the
+lightning flashed, there was a red light in Benham's eyes....
+
+It was only three days after when Prothero discovered exactly the same
+phenomenon in the School House boothole and talked of cats and cattle,
+that White's confidence in their friend was partially restored....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+"Fear, the First Limitation"--his title indicated the spirit of Benham's
+opening book very clearly. His struggle with fear was the very beginning
+of his soul's history. It continued to the end. He had hardly decided to
+lead the noble life before he came bump against the fact that he was
+a physical coward. He felt fear acutely. "Fear," he wrote, "is the
+foremost and most persistent of the shepherding powers that keep us
+in the safe fold, that drive us back to the beaten track and comfort
+and--futility. The beginning of all aristocracy is the subjugation of
+fear."
+
+At first the struggle was so great that he hated fear without any
+qualification; he wanted to abolish it altogether.
+
+"When I was a boy," he writes, "I thought I would conquer fear for good
+and all, and never more be troubled by it. But it is not to be done in
+that way. One might as well dream of having dinner for the rest of one's
+life. Each time and always I have found that it has to be conquered
+afresh. To this day I fear, little things as well as big things. I have
+to grapple with some little dread every day--urge myself.... Just as
+I have to wash and shave myself every day.... I believe it is so with
+every one, but it is difficult to be sure; few men who go into dangers
+care very much to talk about fear...."
+
+Later Benham found some excuses for fear, came even to dealings with
+fear. He never, however, admits that this universal instinct is any
+better than a kindly but unintelligent nurse from whose fostering
+restraints it is man's duty to escape. Discretion, he declared, must
+remain; a sense of proportion, an "adequacy of enterprise," but the
+discretion of an aristocrat is in his head, a tactical detail, it has
+nothing to do with this visceral sinking, this ebb in the nerves. "From
+top to bottom, the whole spectrum of fear is bad, from panic fear at
+one extremity down to that mere disinclination for enterprise, that
+reluctance and indolence which is its lowest phase. These are things of
+the beast, these are for creatures that have a settled environment, a
+life history, that spin in a cage of instincts. But man is a beast of
+that kind no longer, he has left his habitat, he goes out to limitless
+living...."
+
+This idea of man going out into new things, leaving securities, habits,
+customs, leaving his normal life altogether behind him, underlay all
+Benham's aristocratic conceptions. And it was natural that he
+should consider fear as entirely inconvenient, treat it indeed with
+ingratitude, and dwell upon the immense liberations that lie beyond for
+those who will force themselves through its remonstrances....
+
+Benham confessed his liability to fear quite freely in these notes. His
+fear of animals was ineradicable. He had had an overwhelming dread of
+bears until he was twelve or thirteen, the child's irrational dread
+of impossible bears, bears lurking under the bed and in the evening
+shadows. He confesses that even up to manhood he could not cross a
+field containing cattle without keeping a wary eye upon them--his bull
+adventure rather increased than diminished that disposition--he hated a
+strange dog at his heels and would manoeuvre himself as soon as possible
+out of reach of the teeth or heels of a horse. But the peculiar dread of
+his childhood was tigers. Some gaping nursemaid confronted him suddenly
+with a tiger in a cage in the menagerie annexe of a circus. "My small
+mind was overwhelmed."
+
+"I had never thought," White read, "that a tiger was much larger than
+a St. Bernard dog.... This great creature!... I could not believe any
+hunter would attack such a monster except by stealth and with weapons of
+enormous power....
+
+"He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and
+looked over my head with yellow eyes--at some phantom far away. Every
+now and then he snarled. The contempt of his detestable indifference
+sank deeper and deeper into my soul. I knew that were the cage to vanish
+I should stand there motionless, his helpless prey. I knew that were he
+at large in the same building with me I should be too terror-stricken
+to escape him. At the foot of a ladder leading clear to escape I should
+have awaited him paralyzed. At last I gripped my nurse's hand. 'Take me
+away,' I whispered.
+
+"In my dreams that night he stalked me. I made my frozen flight from
+him, I slammed a door on him, and he thrust his paw through a panel
+as though it had been paper and clawed for me. The paw got longer and
+longer....
+
+"I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.
+
+"I remember that he took me in his arms.
+
+"'It's only a big sort of pussy, Poff,' he said. 'FELIS TIGRIS. FELIS,
+you know, means cat.'
+
+"But I knew better. I was in no mood then for my father's insatiable
+pedagoguery.
+
+"'And my little son mustn't be a coward.'...
+
+"After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers alone.
+
+"For years the thought of that tiger's immensity haunted my mind. In
+my dreams I cowered before it a thousand times; in the dusk it rarely
+failed me. On the landing on my way to bed there was a patch of darkness
+beyond a chest that became a lurking horror for me, and sometimes the
+door of my father's bedroom would stand open and there was a long buff
+and crimson-striped shape, by day indeed an ottoman, but by night--.
+Could an ottoman crouch and stir in the flicker of a passing candle?
+Could an ottoman come after you noiselessly, and so close that you could
+not even turn round upon it? No!"
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+When Benham was already seventeen and, as he supposed, hardened against
+his fear of beasts, his friend Prothero gave him an account of the
+killing of an old labouring man by a stallion which had escaped out of
+its stable. The beast had careered across a field, leapt a hedge and
+come upon its victim suddenly. He had run a few paces and stopped,
+trying to defend his head with the horse rearing over him. It beat him
+down with two swift blows of its fore hoofs, one, two, lifted him up in
+its long yellow teeth and worried him as a terrier does a rat--the poor
+old wretch was still able to make a bleating sound at that--dropped him,
+trampled and kicked him as he tried to crawl away, and went on trampling
+and battering him until he was no more than a bloody inhuman bundle of
+clothes and mire. For more than half an hour this continued, and then
+its animal rage was exhausted and it desisted, and went and grazed at
+a little distance from this misshapen, hoof-marked, torn, and muddy
+remnant of a man. No one it seems but a horror-stricken child knew what
+was happening....
+
+This picture of human indignity tortured Benham's imagination much more
+than it tortured the teller of the tale. It filled him with shame and
+horror. For three or four years every detail of that circumstantial
+narrative seemed unforgettable. A little lapse from perfect health and
+the obsession returned. He could not endure the neighing of horses: when
+he saw horses galloping in a field with him his heart stood still. And
+all his life thereafter he hated horses.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+A different sort of fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due to a
+certain clumsiness and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable places.
+There he was more definitely balanced between the hopelessly rash and
+the pitifully discreet.
+
+He had written an account of a private struggle between himself and a
+certain path of planks and rock edges called the Bisse of Leysin. This
+happened in his adolescence. He had had a bad attack of influenza and
+his doctor had sent him to a little hotel--the only hotel it was in
+those days--at Montana in Valais. There, later, when he had picked up
+his strength, his father was to join him and take him mountaineering,
+that second-rate mountaineering which is so dear to dons and
+schoolmasters. When the time came he was ready for that, but he had had
+his experiences. He had gone through a phase of real cowardice. He was
+afraid, he confessed, before even he reached Montana; he was afraid of
+the steepness of the mountains. He had to drive ten or twelve miles
+up and up the mountain-side, a road of innumerable hairpin bends and
+precipitous banks, the horse was gaunt and ugly with a disposition to
+shy, and he confesses he clutched the side of the vehicle and speculated
+how he should jump if presently the whole turnout went tumbling over....
+
+"And afterwards I dreamt dreams of precipices. I made strides over
+precipices, I fell and fell with a floating swiftness towards remote
+valleys, I was assailed by eagles upon a perilous ledge that crumbled
+away and left me clinging by my nails to nothing."
+
+The Bisse of Leysin is one of those artificial water-courses which bring
+water from some distant source to pastures that have an insufficient
+or uncertain supply. It is a little better known than most because of
+a certain exceptional boldness in its construction; for a distance of a
+few score yards it runs supported by iron staples across the front of
+a sheer precipice, and for perhaps half a mile it hangs like an eyebrow
+over nearly or quite vertical walls of pine-set rock. Beside it, on
+the outer side of it, runs a path, which becomes an offhand gangway
+of planking at the overhanging places. At one corner, which gives the
+favourite picture postcard from Montana, the rocks project so sharply
+above the water that the passenger on the gangway must crouch down upon
+the bending plank as he walks. There is no hand-hold at all.
+
+A path from Montana takes one over a pine-clad spur and down a
+precipitous zig-zag upon the middle of the Bisse, and thither Benham
+came, fascinated by the very fact that here was something of which the
+mere report frightened him. He had to walk across the cold clear rush
+of the Bisse upon a pine log, and then he found himself upon one of the
+gentler interludes of the Bisse track. It was a scrambling path nearly
+two feet wide, and below it were slopes, but not so steep as to terrify.
+At a vast distance below he saw through tree-stems and blue haze a
+twisted strand of bright whiteness, the river that joins the Rhone at
+Sion. It looped about and passed out of sight remotely beneath his feet.
+He turned to the right, and came to a corner that overhung a precipice.
+He craned his head round this corner and saw the evil place of the
+picture-postcards.
+
+He remained for a long time trying to screw himself up to walk along the
+jagged six-inch edge of rock between cliff and torrent into which the
+path has shrunken, to the sagging plank under the overhanging rock
+beyond.
+
+He could not bring himself to do that.
+
+"It happened that close to the corner a large lump of rock and earth
+was breaking away, a cleft was opening, so that presently, it seemed
+possible at any moment, the mass would fall headlong into the blue deeps
+below. This impending avalanche was not in my path along the Bisse, it
+was no sort of danger to me, but in some way its insecurity gave a final
+touch to my cowardice. I could not get myself round that corner."
+
+He turned away. He went and examined the planks in the other direction,
+and these he found less forbidding. He crossed one precipitous place,
+with a fall of twoscore feet or less beneath him, and found worse ahead.
+There also he managed. A third place was still more disagreeable.
+The plank was worn and thin, and sagged under him. He went along it
+supporting himself against the rock above the Bisse with an extended
+hand. Halfway the rock fell back, so that there was nothing whatever
+to hold. He stopped, hesitating whether he should go back--but on
+this plank there was no going back because no turning round seemed
+practicable. While he was still hesitating there came a helpful
+intervention. Behind him he saw a peasant appearing and disappearing
+behind trees and projecting rock masses, and coming across the previous
+plank at a vigorous trot....
+
+Under the stimulus of a spectator Benham got to the end of this third
+place without much trouble. Then very politely he stood aside for the
+expert to go ahead so that he could follow at his own pace.
+
+There were, however, more difficulties yet to come, and a disagreeable
+humiliation. That confounded peasant developed a parental solicitude.
+After each crossing he waited, and presently began to offer advice and
+encouragement. At last came a place where everything was overhanging,
+where the Bisse was leaking, and the plank wet and slippery. The water
+ran out of the leak near the brim of the wooden channel and fell in a
+long shivering thread of silver. THERE WAS NO SOUND OF ITS FALL. It just
+fell--into a void. Benham wished he had not noted that. He groaned, but
+faced the plank; he knew this would be the slowest affair of all.
+
+The peasant surveyed him from the further side.
+
+"Don't be afraid!" cried the peasant in his clumsy Valaisian French,
+and returned, returning along the plank that seemed quite sufficiently
+loaded without him, extending a charitable hand.
+
+"Damn!" whispered Benham, but he took the hand.
+
+Afterwards, rather ignobly, he tried to explain in his public-school
+French. "Pas de peur," he said. "Pas de peur. Mais la tete, n'a pas
+l'habitude."
+
+The peasant, failing to understand, assured him again that there was no
+danger.
+
+("Damn!")
+
+Benham was led over all the other planks, he was led as if he was an
+old lady crossing a glacier. He was led into absolute safety, and
+shamefacedly he rewarded his guide. Then he went a little way and sat
+down, swore softly, and watched the honest man go striding and plunging
+down towards Lens until he was out of sight.
+
+"Now," said Benham to himself, "if I do not go back along the planks my
+secret honour is gone for ever."
+
+He told himself that he had not a good head, that he was not well, that
+the sun was setting and the light no longer good, that he had a very
+good chance indeed of getting killed. Then it came to him suddenly as a
+clear and simple truth, as something luminously plain, that it is better
+to get killed than go away defeated by such fears and unsteadiness as
+his. The change came into his mind as if a white light were suddenly
+turned on--where there had been nothing but shadows and darkness. He
+rose to his feet and went swiftly and intently the whole way back, going
+with a kind of temperate recklessness, and, because he was no longer
+careful, easily. He went on beyond his starting place toward the corner,
+and did that supreme bit, to and fro, that bit where the lump was
+falling away, and he had to crouch, as gaily as the rest. Then he
+recrossed the Bisse upon the pine log, clambered up through the pines to
+the crest, and returned through the meadows to his own hotel.
+
+After that he should have slept the sleep of contentment, but instead
+he had quite dreadful nightmares, of hanging in frozen fear above
+incredible declivities, of ill-aimed leaps across chasms to slippery
+footholds, of planks that swayed and broke suddenly in the middle and
+headed him down and down....
+
+The next day in the sunshine he walked the Bisse again with those dreams
+like trailing mists in his mind, and by comparison the path of the Bisse
+was nothing, it was like walking along a kerbstone, it was an exercise
+for young ladies....
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+In his younger days Benham had regarded Fear as a shameful secret and as
+a thing to be got rid of altogether. It seemed to him that to feel fear
+was to fall short of aristocracy, and in spite of the deep dreads
+and disgusts that haunted his mind, he set about the business of its
+subjugation as if it were a spiritual amputation. But as he emerged
+from the egotism of adolescence he came to realize that this was
+too comprehensive an operation; every one feels fear, and your true
+aristocrat is not one who has eliminated, but one who controls or
+ignores it. Brave men are men who do things when they are afraid to do
+them, just as Nelson, even when he was seasick, and he was frequently
+seasick, was still master of the sea. Benham developed two leading ideas
+about fear; one that it is worse at the first onset, and far worse than
+any real experience, and the other that fear is essentially a social
+instinct. He set himself upon these lines to study--what can we call
+it?--the taming of fear, the nature, care, and management of fear....
+
+"Fear is very like pain in this, that it is a deterrent thing. It is
+superficial. Just as a man's skin is infinitely more sensitive than
+anything inside.... Once you have forced yourself or have been forced
+through the outward fear into vivid action or experience, you feel very
+little. The worst moment is before things happen. Rowe, the African
+sportsman, told me that he had seen cowardice often enough in the
+presence of lions, but he had never seen any one actually charged by a
+lion who did not behave well. I have heard the same thing of many sorts
+of dangers.
+
+"I began to suspect this first in the case of falling or jumping down.
+Giddiness may be an almost intolerable torture, and falling nothing of
+the sort. I once saw the face of an old man who had flung himself out
+of a high window in Rome, and who had been killed instantly on the
+pavement; it was not simply a serene face, it was glad, exalted. I
+suspect that when we have broken the shell of fear, falling may be
+delightful. Jumping down is, after all, only a steeper tobogganing, and
+tobogganing a milder jumping down. Always I used to funk at the top
+of the Cresta run. I suffered sometimes almost intolerably; I found
+it almost impossible to get away. The first ten yards was like being
+slashed open with a sharp sword. But afterwards there was nothing but
+joyful thrills. All instinct, too, fought against me when I tried high
+diving. I managed it, and began to like it. I had to give it up because
+of my ears, but not until I had established the habit of stepping
+through that moment of disinclination.
+
+"I was Challoner's passenger when he was killed at Sheerness. That was
+a queer unexpected experience, you may have supposed it an agony of
+terror, but indeed there was no fear in it at all. At any rate, I do not
+remember a moment of fear; it has gone clean out of my memory if ever it
+was there. We were swimming high and fast, three thousand feet or so, in
+a clear, sweet air over the town of Sheerness. The river, with a
+string of battleships, was far away to the west of us, and the endless
+grey-blue flats of the Thames to the north. The sun was low behind a
+bank of cloud. I was watching a motor-car, which seemed to be crawling
+slowly enough, though, no doubt, it was making a respectable pace,
+between two hedges down below. It is extraordinary how slowly everything
+seems to be going when one sees it from such an height.
+
+"Then the left wing of the monoplane came up like a door that slams,
+some wires whistled past my head, and one whipped off my helmet, and
+then, with the seat slipping away from me, down we went. I snatched
+unavailingly for the helmet, and then gripped the sides. It was like
+dropping in a boat suddenly into the trough of a wave--and going on
+dropping. We were both strapped, and I got my feet against the side and
+clung to the locked second wheel.
+
+"The sensation was as though something like an intermittent electric
+current was pouring through me. It's a ridiculous image to use, I can't
+justify it, but it was as if I was having cold blue light squirted
+through every pore of my being. There was an astonishment, a feeling
+of confirmation. 'Of course these things do happen sometimes,' I told
+myself. I don't remember that Challoner looked round or said anything at
+all. I am not sure that I looked at him....
+
+"There seemed to be a long interval of intensely excited curiosity, and
+I remember thinking, 'Lord, but we shall come a smash in a minute!'
+Far ahead I saw the grey sheds of Eastchurch and people strolling
+about apparently unaware of our disaster. There was a sudden silence as
+Challoner stopped the engine....
+
+"But the point I want to insist upon is that I did not feel afraid. I
+was simply enormously, terribly INTERESTED....
+
+"There came a tremendous jolt and a lunge, and we were both tipped
+forward, so that we were hanging forehead down by our straps, and it
+looked as if the sheds were in the sky, then I saw nothing but sky, then
+came another vast swerve, and we were falling sideways, sideways....
+
+"I was altogether out of breath and PHYSICALLY astonished, and I
+remember noting quite intelligently as we hit the ground how the green
+grass had an effect of POURING OUT in every direction from below us....
+
+"Then I remember a jerk and a feeling that I was flying up again. I was
+astonished by a tremendous popping--fabric, wires, everything seemed
+going pop, pop, pop, like a machine-gun, and then came a flash of
+intense pain as my arm crumpled up. It was quite impersonal pain. As
+impersonal as seeing intense colour. SPLINTERS! I remember the word came
+into my head instantly. I remember that very definitely.
+
+"I thought, I suppose, my arm was in splinters. Or perhaps of the scraps
+and ends of rods and wires flying about us. It is curious that while I
+remember the word I cannot recall the idea....
+
+"When I became conscious again the chief thing present in my mind was
+that all those fellows round were young soldiers who wouldn't at all
+understand bad behaviour. My arm was--orchestral, but still far from
+being real suffering IN me. Also I wanted to know what Challoner had
+got. They wouldn't understand my questions, and then I twisted round and
+saw from the negligent way his feet came out from under the engine that
+he must be dead. And dark red stains with bright red froth--
+
+"Of course!
+
+"There again the chief feeling was a sense of oddity. I wasn't sorry for
+him any more than I was for myself.
+
+"It seemed to me that it was all right with us both, remarkable, vivid,
+but all right...."
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+"But though there is little or no fear in an aeroplane, even when it
+is smashing up, there is fear about aeroplanes. There is something that
+says very urgently, 'Don't,' to the man who looks up into the sky. It
+is very interesting to note how at a place like Eastchurch or Brooklands
+the necessary discretion trails the old visceral feeling with it,
+and how men will hang about, ready to go up, resolved to go up, but
+delaying. Men of indisputable courage will get into a state between
+dread and laziness, and waste whole hours of flying weather on any
+excuse or no excuse. Once they are up that inhibition vanishes. The man
+who was delaying and delaying half an hour ago will now be cutting the
+most venturesome capers in the air. Few men are in a hurry to get down
+again. I mean that quite apart from the hesitation of landing, they like
+being up there."
+
+Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory.
+
+"Fear, you see, is the inevitable janitor, but it is not the ruler of
+experience. That is what I am driving at in all this. The bark of danger
+is worse than its bite. Inside the portals there may be events and
+destruction, but terror stays defeated at the door. It may be that when
+that old man was killed by a horse the child who watched suffered more
+than he did....
+
+"I am sure that was so...."
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+As White read Benham's notes and saw how his argument drove on, he was
+reminded again and again of those schoolboy days and Benham's hardihood,
+and his own instinctive unreasonable reluctance to follow those gallant
+intellectual leads. If fear is an ancient instinctive boundary that the
+modern life, the aristocratic life, is bound to ignore and transcend,
+may this not also be the case with pain? We do a little adventure into
+the "life beyond fear"; may we not also think of adventuring into the
+life beyond pain? Is pain any saner a warning than fear? May not pain
+just as much as fear keep us from possible and splendid things? But why
+ask a question that is already answered in principle in every dentist's
+chair? Benham's idea, however, went much further than that, he was
+clearly suggesting that in pain itself, pain endured beyond a certain
+pitch, there might come pleasure again, an intensity of sensation
+that might have the colour of delight. He betrayed a real anxiety to
+demonstrate this possibility, he had the earnestness of a man who is
+sensible of dissentient elements within. He hated the thought of
+pain even more than he hated fear. His arguments did not in the least
+convince White, who stopped to poke the fire and assure himself of his
+own comfort in the midst of his reading.
+
+Young people and unseasoned people, Benham argued, are apt to imagine
+that if fear is increased and carried to an extreme pitch it becomes
+unbearable, one will faint or die; given a weak heart, a weak artery or
+any such structural defect and that may well happen, but it is just as
+possible that as the stimulation increases one passes through a brief
+ecstasy of terror to a new sane world, exalted but as sane as normal
+existence. There is the calmness of despair. Benham had made some notes
+to enforce this view, of the observed calm behaviour of men already
+hopelessly lost, men on sinking ships, men going to execution, men
+already maimed and awaiting the final stroke, but for the most part
+these were merely references to books and periodicals. In exactly the
+same way, he argued, we exaggerate the range of pain as if it were
+limitless. We think if we are unthinking that it passes into agony and
+so beyond endurance to destruction. It probably does nothing of the
+kind. Benham compared pain to the death range of the electric current.
+At a certain voltage it thrills, at a greater it torments and convulses,
+at a still greater it kills. But at enormous voltages, as Tesla was
+the first to demonstrate, it does no injury. And following on this came
+memoranda on the recorded behaviour of martyrs, on the self-torture of
+Hindoo ascetics, of the defiance of Red Indian prisoners.
+
+"These things," Benham had written, "are much more horrible when one
+considers them from the point of view of an easy-chair";--White gave
+an assenting nod--"ARE THEY REALLY HORRIBLE AT ALL? Is it possible that
+these charred and slashed and splintered persons, those Indians hanging
+from hooks, those walkers in the fiery furnace, have had glimpses
+through great windows that were worth the price they paid for them?
+Haven't we allowed those checks and barriers that are so important a
+restraint upon childish enterprise, to creep up into and distress and
+distort adult life?...
+
+"The modern world thinks too much as though painlessness and freedom
+from danger were ultimate ends. It is fear-haunted, it is troubled
+by the thoughts of pain and death, which it has never met except as
+well-guarded children meet these things, in exaggerated and untestable
+forms, in the menagerie or in nightmares. And so it thinks the discovery
+of anaesthetics the crowning triumph of civilization, and cosiness and
+innocent amusement, those ideals of the nursery, the whole purpose of
+mankind...."
+
+"Mm," said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his brows
+and shook his head.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+But the bulk of Benham's discussion of fear was not concerned with
+this perverse and overstrained suggestion of pleasure reached through
+torture, this exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink at
+anything; it was an examination of the present range and use of fear
+that led gradually to something like a theory of control and discipline.
+The second of his two dominating ideas was that fear is an instinct
+arising only in isolation, that in a crowd there may be a collective
+panic, but that there is no real individual fear. Fear, Benham held,
+drives the man back to the crowd, the dog to its master, the wolf to the
+pack, and when it is felt that the danger is pooled, then fear leaves
+us. He was quite prepared to meet the objection that animals of a
+solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit fear. Some of this apparent fear,
+he argued, was merely discretion, and what is not discretion is the
+survival of an infantile characteristic. The fear felt by a tiger cub
+is certainly a social emotion, that drives it back to the other cubs,
+to its mother and the dark hiding of the lair. The fear of a fully grown
+tiger sends it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, that must be
+"still reminiscent of the maternal lair." But fear has very little hold
+upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme readiness to
+resentment and rage.
+
+"Like most inexperienced people," ran his notes, "I was astonished at
+the reported feats of men in war; I believed they were exaggerated,
+and that there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy of silence about
+their real behaviour. But when on my way to visit India for the third
+time I turned off to see what I could of the fighting before Adrianople,
+I discovered at once that a thousand casually selected conscripts will,
+every one of them, do things together that not one of them could by any
+means be induced to do alone. I saw men not merely obey orders that
+gave them the nearly certain prospect of death, but I saw them exceeding
+orders; I saw men leap out of cover for the mere sake of defiance, and
+fall shot through and smashed by a score of bullets. I saw a number
+of Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, several quite frightfully
+wounded, refuse chloroform merely to impress the English onlooker, some
+of their injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched a line
+of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on quite manifestly cheerful
+with men dropping out and wriggling, and men dropping out and lying
+still until every other man was down.... Not one man would have gone up
+that hill alone, without onlookers...."
+
+Rowe, the lion hunter, told Benham that only on one occasion in his life
+had he given way to ungovernable fear, and that was when he was alone.
+Many times he had been in fearful situations in the face of charging
+lions and elephants, and once he had been bowled over and carried some
+distance by a lion, but on none of these occasions had fear demoralized
+him. There was no question of his general pluck. But on one occasion he
+was lost in rocky waterless country in Somaliland. He strayed out in the
+early morning while his camels were being loaded, followed some antelope
+too far, and lost his bearings. He looked up expecting to see the sun
+on his right hand and found it on his left. He became bewildered. He
+wandered some time and then fired three signal shots and got no reply.
+Then losing his head he began shouting. He had only four or five more
+cartridges and no water-bottle. His men were accustomed to his going on
+alone, and might not begin to remark upon his absence until sundown....
+It chanced, however, that one of the shikari noted the water-bottle he
+had left behind and organized a hunt for him.
+
+Long before they found him he had passed to an extremity of terror. The
+world had become hideous and threatening, the sun was a pitiless glare,
+each rocky ridge he clambered became more dreadful than the last, each
+new valley into which he looked more hateful and desolate, the cramped
+thorn bushes threatened him gauntly, the rocks had a sinister lustre,
+and in every blue shadow about him the night and death lurked and
+waited. There was no hurry for them, presently they would spread out
+again and join and submerge him, presently in the confederated darkness
+he could be stalked and seized and slain. Yes, this he admitted was real
+fear. He had cracked his voice, yelling as a child yells. And then he
+had become afraid of his own voice....
+
+"Now this excess of fear in isolation, this comfort in a crowd, in
+support and in a refuge, even when support or refuge is quite illusory,
+is just exactly what one would expect of fear if one believed it to be
+an instinct which has become a misfit. In the ease of the soldier fear
+is so much a misfit that instead of saving him for the most part it
+destroys him. Raw soldiers under fire bunch together and armies fight in
+masses, men are mowed down in swathes, because only so is the courage of
+the common men sustained, only so can they be brave, albeit spread out
+and handling their weapons as men of unqualified daring would handle
+them they would be infinitely safer and more effective....
+
+"And all of us, it may be, are restrained by this misfit fear from a
+thousand bold successful gestures of mind and body, we are held back
+from the attainment of mighty securities in pitiful temporary shelters
+that are perhaps in the end no better than traps...."
+
+From such considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the crowd
+can be replaced in a man's imagination, how far some substitute for that
+social backing can be made to serve the same purpose in neutralizing
+fear. He wrote with the calm of a man who weighs the probabilities of a
+riddle, and with the zeal of a man lost to every material consideration.
+His writing, it seemed to White, had something of the enthusiastic
+whiteness of his face, the enthusiastic brightness of his eyes. We can
+no more banish fear from our being at present than we can carve out the
+fleshy pillars of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain. It is deep
+in our inheritance. As deep as hunger. And just as we have to satisfy
+hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy the
+unconquerable importunity of fear. We have to reassure our faltering
+instincts. There must be something to take the place of lair and
+familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we must carry with
+us into the lonely places. For it is true that man has now not only
+to learn to fight in open order instead of in a phalanx, but he has to
+think and plan and act in open order, to live in open order....
+
+Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, "This brings
+me to God."
+
+"The devil it does!" said White, roused to a keener attention.
+
+"By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so long as
+we feel indeed alone. An isolated man, an egoist, an Epicurean man, will
+always fail himself in the solitary place. There must be something more
+with us to sustain us against this vast universe than the spark of life
+that began yesterday and must be extinguished to-morrow. There can be
+no courage beyond social courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd,
+until there is in us the sense of God. But God is a word that covers a
+multitude of meanings. When I was a boy I was a passionate atheist, I
+defied God, and so far as God is the mere sanction of social traditions
+and pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd's will in canonicals, I
+do still deny him and repudiate him. That God I heard of first from my
+nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper God of all the nursemaids
+of mankind. But there is another God than that God of obedience, God the
+immortal adventurer in me, God who calls men from home and country, God
+scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in a nail-pierced body out of
+death and came not to bring peace but a sword."
+
+With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who
+was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of
+Benham's spirit. They were written in pencil; they were unfinished when
+he died.
+
+(Surely the man was not a Christian!)
+
+"You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you cannot
+suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain because you
+have identified your life with the honour of mankind and the insatiable
+adventurousness of man's imagination, so that the possible death is
+negligible and the possible achievement altogether outweighs it."...
+
+White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.
+
+He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had always
+taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever. But this
+was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it seemed to
+him, a posthumous betrayal....
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon Benham.
+He had gone with Kepple, of the forestry department, into the jungle
+country in the hills above the Tapti. He had been very anxious to see
+something of that aspect of Indian life, and he had snatched at the
+chance Kepple had given him. But they had scarcely started before the
+expedition was brought to an end by an accident, Kepple was thrown by
+a pony and his ankle broken. He and Benham bandaged it as well as they
+could, and a litter was sent for, and meanwhile they had to wait in the
+camp that was to have been the centre of their jungle raids. The second
+day of this waiting was worse for Kepple than the first, and he suffered
+much from the pressure of this amateurish bandaging. In the evening
+Benham got cool water from the well and rearranged things better; the
+two men dined and smoked under their thatched roof beneath the big
+banyan, and then Kepple, tired out by his day of pain, was carried to
+his tent. Presently he fell asleep and Benham was left to himself.
+
+Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to sleep.
+He felt full of life and anxious for happenings.
+
+He went back and sat down upon the iron bedstead beneath the banyan,
+that Kepple had lain upon through the day, and he watched the soft
+immensity of the Indian night swallow up the last lingering colours of
+the world. It left the outlines, it obliterated nothing, but it stripped
+off the superficial reality of things. The moon was full and high
+overhead, and the light had not so much gone as changed from definition
+and the blazing glitter and reflections of solidity to a translucent and
+unsubstantial clearness. The jungle that bordered the little encampment
+north, south, and west seemed to have crept a little nearer, enriched
+itself with blackness, taken to itself voices.
+
+(Surely it had been silent during the day.)
+
+A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead grass and the
+leaves. In the day the air had been still.
+
+Immediately after the sunset there had been a great crying of peacocks
+in the distance, but that was over now; the crickets, however,
+were still noisy, and a persistent sound had become predominant, an
+industrious unmistakable sound, a sound that took his mind back to
+England, in midsummer. It was like a watchman's rattle--a nightjar!
+
+So there were nightjars here in India, too! One might have expected
+something less familiar. And then came another cry from far away over
+the heat-stripped tree-tops, a less familiar cry. It was repeated. Was
+that perhaps some craving leopard, a tiger cat, a panther?--
+
+"HUNT, HUNT"; that might be a deer.
+
+Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite close
+at hand. A monkey?...
+
+These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were
+bats....
+
+Of course, the day jungle is the jungle asleep. This was its waking
+hour. Now the deer were arising from their forms, the bears creeping
+out of their dens amidst the rocks and blundering down the gullies,
+the tigers and panthers and jungle cats stalking noiselessly from their
+lairs in the grass. Countless creatures that had hidden from the heat
+and pitiless exposure of the day stood now awake and alertly intent upon
+their purposes, grazed or sought water, flitting delicately through the
+moonlight and shadows. The jungle was awakening. Again Benham heard that
+sound like the belling of a stag....
+
+This was the real life of the jungle, this night life, into which man
+did not go. Here he was on the verge of a world that for all the stuffed
+trophies of the sportsman and the specimens of the naturalist is still
+almost as unknown as if it was upon another planet. What intruders men
+are, what foreigners in the life of this ancient system!
+
+He looked over his shoulder, and there were the two little tents,
+one that sheltered Kepple and one that awaited him, and beyond, in an
+irregular line, glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men. One or two
+turbaned figures still flitted about, and there was a voice--low,
+monotonous--it must have been telling a tale. Further, sighing and
+stirring ever and again, were tethered beasts, and then a great pale
+space of moonlight and the clumsy outlines of the village well. The
+clustering village itself slept in darkness beyond the mango trees,
+and still remoter the black encircling jungle closed in. One might have
+fancied this was the encampment of newly-come invaders, were it not
+for the larger villages that are overgrown with thickets and altogether
+swallowed up again in the wilderness, and for the deserted temples that
+are found rent asunder by the roots of trees and the ancient embankments
+that hold water only for the drinking of the sambur deer....
+
+Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again....
+
+He had come far out of his way to visit this strange world of the
+ancient life, that now recedes and dwindles before our new civilization,
+that seems fated to shrivel up and pass altogether before the dry
+advance of physical science and material organization. He was full of
+unsatisfied curiosities about its fierce hungers and passions, its fears
+and cruelties, its instincts and its well-nigh incommunicable and yet
+most precious understandings. He had long ceased to believe that the
+wild beast is wholly evil, and safety and plenty the ultimate good for
+men....
+
+Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life than he
+was now.
+
+It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand and so
+inaccessible....
+
+As Benham sat brooding over his disappointment the moon, swimming on
+through the still circle of the hours, passed slowly over him. The
+lights and shadows about him changed by imperceptible gradations and
+a long pale alley where the native cart track drove into the forest,
+opened slowly out of the darkness, slowly broadened, slowly lengthened.
+It opened out to him with a quality of invitation....
+
+There was the jungle before him. Was it after all so inaccessible?
+
+"Come!" the road said to him.
+
+Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the moonlight and stood
+motionless.
+
+Was he afraid?
+
+Even now some hungry watchful monster might lurk in yonder shadows,
+watching with infinite still patience. Kepple had told him how they
+would sit still for hours--staring unblinkingly as cats stare at a
+fire--and then crouch to advance. Beneath the shrill overtone of
+the nightjars, what noiseless grey shapes, what deep breathings and
+cracklings and creepings might there not be?...
+
+Was he afraid?
+
+That question determined him to go.
+
+He hesitated whether he should take a gun. A stick? A gun, he knew, was
+a dangerous thing to an inexperienced man. No! He would go now, even as
+he was with empty hands. At least he would go as far as the end of that
+band of moonlight. If for no other reason than because he was afraid.
+NOW!
+
+For a moment it seemed to him as though his feet were too heavy to lift
+and then, hands in pockets, khaki-clad, an almost invisible figure, he
+strolled towards the cart-track.
+
+Come to that, he halted for a moment to regard the distant fires of
+the men. No one would miss him. They would think he was in his tent.
+He faced the stirring quiet ahead. The cart-track was a rutted path of
+soft, warm sand, on which he went almost noiselessly. A bird squabbled
+for an instant in a thicket. A great white owl floated like a flake of
+moonlight across the track and vanished without a sound among the trees.
+
+Along the moonlit path went Benham, and when he passed near trees his
+footsteps became noisy with the rustle and crash of dead leaves. The
+jungle was full of moonlight; twigs, branches, creepers, grass-clumps
+came out acutely vivid. The trees and bushes stood in pools of darkness,
+and beyond were pale stretches of misty moonshine and big rocks shining
+with an unearthly lustre. Things seemed to be clear and yet uncertain.
+It was as if they dissolved or retired a little and then returned to
+solidity.
+
+A sudden chattering broke out overhead, and black across the great
+stars soared a flying squirrel and caught a twig, and ran for shelter.
+A second hesitated in a tree-top and pursued. They chased each other and
+vanished abruptly. He forgot his sense of insecurity in the interest of
+these active little silhouettes. And he noted how much bigger and more
+wonderful the stars can look when one sees them through interlacing
+branches.
+
+Ahead was darkness; but not so dark when he came to it that the track
+was invisible. He was at the limit of his intention, but now he saw that
+that had been a childish project. He would go on, he would walk right
+into the jungle. His first disinclination was conquered, and the soft
+intoxication of the subtropical moonshine was in his blood.... But he
+wished he could walk as a spirit walks, without this noise of leaves....
+
+Yes, this was very wonderful and beautiful, and there must always be
+jungles for men to walk in. Always there must be jungles....
+
+Some small beast snarled and bolted from under his feet. He stopped
+sharply. He had come into a darkness under great boughs, and now he
+stood still as the little creature scuttled away. Beyond the track
+emerged into a dazzling whiteness....
+
+In the stillness he could hear the deer belling again in the distance,
+and then came a fuss of monkeys in a group of trees near at hand. He
+remained still until this had died away into mutterings.
+
+Then on the verge of movement he was startled by a ripe mango that
+slipped from its stalk and fell out of the tree and struck his hand.
+It took a little time to understand that, and then he laughed, and his
+muscles relaxed, and he went on again.
+
+A thorn caught at him and he disentangled himself.
+
+He crossed the open space, and the moon was like a great shield of light
+spread out above him. All the world seemed swimming in its radiance. The
+stars were like lamps in a mist of silvery blue.
+
+The track led him on across white open spaces of shrivelled grass and
+sand, amidst trees where shadows made black patternings upon the silver,
+and then it plunged into obscurities. For a time it lifted, and then
+on one hand the bush fell away, and he saw across a vast moonlit valley
+wide undulations of open cultivation, belts of jungle, copses, and a
+great lake as black as ebony. For a time the path ran thus open, and
+then the jungle closed in again and there were more thickets, more
+levels of grass, and in one place far overhead among the branches he
+heard and stood for a time perplexed at a vast deep humming of bees....
+
+Presently a black monster with a hunched back went across his path
+heedless of him and making a great noise in the leaves. He stood quite
+still until it had gone. He could not tell whether it was a boar or
+hyaena; most probably, he thought, a boar because of the heaviness of
+its rush.
+
+The path dropped downhill for a time, crossed a ravine, ascended. He
+passed a great leafless tree on which there were white flowers. On the
+ground also, in the darkness under the tree, there were these flowers;
+they were dropping noiselessly, and since they were visible in the
+shadows, it seemed to him that they must be phosphorescent. And they
+emitted a sweetish scent that lay heavily athwart the path. Presently he
+passed another such tree. Then he became aware of a tumult ahead of him,
+a smashing of leaves, a snorting and slobbering, grunting and sucking,
+a whole series of bestial sounds. He halted for a little while, and then
+drew nearer, picking his steps to avoid too great a noise. Here were
+more of those white-blossomed trees, and beneath, in the darkness,
+something very black and big was going to and fro, eating greedily. Then
+he found that there were two and then more of these black things, three
+or four of them.
+
+Curiosity made Benham draw nearer, very softly.
+
+Presently one showed in a patch of moonlight, startlingly big, a huge,
+black hairy monster with a long white nose on a grotesque face, and he
+was stuffing armfuls of white blossom into his mouth with his curved
+fore claws. He took not the slightest notice of the still man, who stood
+perhaps twenty yards away from him. He was too blind and careless. He
+snorted and smacked his slobbering lips, and plunged into the shadows
+again. Benham heard him root among the leaves and grunt appreciatively.
+The air was heavy with the reek of the crushed flowers.
+
+For some time Benham remained listening to and peering at these
+preoccupied gluttons. At last he shrugged his shoulders, and left them
+and went on his way. For a long time he could hear them, then just as he
+was on the verge of forgetting them altogether, some dispute arose among
+them, and there began a vast uproar, squeals, protests, comments, one
+voice ridiculously replete and authoritative, ridiculously suggestive
+of a drunken judge with his mouth full, and a shrill voice of grievance
+high above the others....
+
+The uproar of the bears died away at last, almost abruptly, and left the
+jungle to the incessant night-jars....
+
+For what end was this life of the jungle?
+
+All Benham's senses were alert to the sounds and appearances about him,
+and at the same time his mind was busy with the perplexities of that
+riddle. Was the jungle just an aimless pool of life that man must drain
+and clear away? Or is it to have a use in the greater life of our race
+that now begins? Will man value the jungle as he values the precipice,
+for the sake of his manhood? Will he preserve it?
+
+Man must keep hard, man must also keep fierce. Will the jungle keep him
+fierce?
+
+For life, thought Benham, there must be insecurity....
+
+He had missed the track....
+
+He was now in a second ravine. He was going downward, walking on silvery
+sand amidst great boulders, and now there was a new sound in the
+air--. It was the croaking of frogs. Ahead was a solitary gleam. He was
+approaching a jungle pool....
+
+Suddenly the stillness was alive, in a panic uproar. "HONK!" cried a
+great voice, and "HONK!" There was a clatter of hoofs, a wild rush--a
+rush as it seemed towards him. Was he being charged? He backed against a
+rock. A great pale shape leaped by him, an antlered shape. It was a herd
+of big deer bolting suddenly out of the stillness. He heard the swish
+and smash of their retreat grow distant, disperse. He remained standing
+with his back to the rock.
+
+Slowly the strophe and antistrophe of frogs and goat-suckers resumed
+possession of his consciousness. But now some primitive instinct
+perhaps or some subconscious intimation of danger made him meticulously
+noiseless.
+
+He went on down a winding sound-deadening path of sand towards the
+drinking-place. He came to a wide white place that was almost level, and
+beyond it under clustering pale-stemmed trees shone the mirror surface
+of some ancient tank, and, sharp and black, a dog-like beast sat on its
+tail in the midst of this space, started convulsively and went slinking
+into the undergrowth. Benham paused for a moment and then walked out
+softly into the light, and, behold! as if it were to meet him, came
+a monster, a vast dark shape drawing itself lengthily out of the
+blackness, and stopped with a start as if it had been instantly changed
+to stone.
+
+It had stopped with one paw advanced. Its striped mask was light and
+dark grey in the moonlight, grey but faintly tinged with ruddiness; its
+mouth was a little open, its fangs and a pendant of viscous saliva shone
+vivid. Its great round-pupilled eyes regarded him stedfastly. At last
+the nightmare of Benham's childhood had come true, and he was face to
+face with a tiger, uncaged, uncontrolled.
+
+For some moments neither moved, neither the beast nor the man. They
+stood face to face, each perhaps with an equal astonishment, motionless
+and soundless, in that mad Indian moonlight that makes all things like a
+dream.
+
+Benham stood quite motionless, and body and mind had halted together.
+That confrontation had an interminableness that had nothing to do with
+the actual passage of time. Then some trickle of his previous thoughts
+stirred in the frozen quiet of his mind.
+
+He spoke hoarsely. "I am Man," he said, and lifted a hand as he spoke.
+"The Thought of the world."
+
+His heart leapt within him as the tiger moved. But the great beast
+went sideways, gardant, only that its head was low, three noiseless
+instantaneous strides it made, and stood again watching him.
+
+"Man," he said, in a voice that had no sound, and took a step forward.
+
+"Wough!" With two bounds the monster had become a great grey streak
+that crackled and rustled in the shadows of the trees. And then it
+had vanished, become invisible and inaudible with a kind of
+instantaneousness.
+
+For some seconds or some minutes Benham stood rigid, fearlessly
+expectant, and then far away up the ravine he heard the deer repeat
+their cry of alarm, and understood with a new wisdom that the tiger had
+passed among them and was gone....
+
+He walked on towards the deserted tank and now he was talking aloud.
+
+"I understand the jungle. I understand.... If a few men die here, what
+matter? There are worse deaths than being killed....
+
+"What is this fool's trap of security?
+
+"Every time in my life that I have fled from security I have fled from
+death....
+
+"Let men stew in their cities if they will. It is in the lonely places,
+in jungles and mountains, in snows and fires, in the still observatories
+and the silent laboratories, in those secret and dangerous places where
+life probes into life, it is there that the masters of the world, the
+lords of the beast, the rebel sons of Fate come to their own....
+
+"You sleeping away there in the cities! Do you know what it means for
+you that I am here to-night?
+
+"Do you know what it means to you?
+
+"I am just one--just the precursor.
+
+"Presently, if you will not budge, those hot cities must be burnt about
+you. You must come out of them...."
+
+He wandered now uttering his thoughts as they came to him, and he saw no
+more living creatures because they fled and hid before the sound of his
+voice. He wandered until the moon, larger now and yellow tinged, was low
+between the black bars of the tree stems. And then it sank very suddenly
+behind a hilly spur and the light failed swiftly.
+
+He stumbled and went with difficulty. He could go no further among these
+rocks and ravines, and he sat down at the foot of a tree to wait for
+day.
+
+He sat very still indeed.
+
+A great stillness came over the world, a velvet silence that wrapped
+about him, as the velvet shadows wrapped about him. The corncrakes had
+ceased, all the sounds and stir of animal life had died away, the breeze
+had fallen. A drowsing comfort took possession of him. He grew more
+placid and more placid still. He was enormously content to find that
+fear had fled before him and was gone. He drifted into that state of
+mind when one thinks without ideas, when one's mind is like a starless
+sky, serene and empty.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+Some hours later Benham found that the trees and rocks were growing
+visible again, and he saw a very bright star that he knew must be
+Lucifer rising amidst the black branches. He was sitting upon a rock at
+the foot of a slender-stemmed leafless tree. He had been asleep, and it
+was daybreak. Everything was coldly clear and colourless.
+
+He must have slept soundly.
+
+He heard a cock crow, and another answer--jungle fowl these must be,
+because there could be no village within earshot--and then far away and
+bringing back memories of terraced houses and ripe walled gardens, was
+the scream of peacocks. And some invisible bird was making a hollow
+beating sound among the trees near at hand. TUNK.... TUNK, and out of
+the dry grass came a twittering.
+
+There was a green light in the east that grew stronger, and the stars
+after their magnitudes were dissolving in the blue; only a few remained
+faintly visible. The sound of birds increased. Through the trees he saw
+towering up a great mauve thing like the back of a monster,--but that
+was nonsense, it was the crest of a steep hillside covered with woods of
+teak.
+
+He stood up and stretched himself, and wondered whether he had dreamed
+of a tiger.
+
+He tried to remember and retrace the course of his over-night
+wanderings.
+
+A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and then
+far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart.
+
+He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly and
+thoughtfully.
+
+Presently he came to a familiar place, a group of trees, a sheet of
+water, and the ruins of an old embankment. It was the ancient tank of
+his overnight encounter. The pool of his dream?
+
+With doubt still in his mind, he walked round its margin to the sandy
+level beyond, and cast about and sought intently, and at last found, and
+then found clearly, imposed upon the tracks of several sorts of deer and
+the footprints of many biggish birds, first the great spoor of the
+tiger and then his own. Here the beast had halted, and here it had leapt
+aside. Here his own footmarks stopped. Here his heels had come together.
+
+It had been no dream.
+
+There was a white mist upon the water of the old tank like the bloom
+upon a plum, and the trees about it seemed smaller and the sand-space
+wider and rougher than they had seemed in the moonshine. Then the ground
+had looked like a floor of frosted silver.
+
+And thence he went on upward through the fresh morning, until just as
+the east grew red with sunrise, he reached the cart-track from which he
+had strayed overnight. It was, he found, a longer way back to the camp
+than he remembered it to be. Perhaps he had struck the path further
+along. It curved about and went up and down and crossed three ravines.
+At last he came to that trampled place of littered white blossom under
+great trees where he had seen the bears.
+
+The sunlight went before him in a sheaf of golden spears, and his
+shadow, that was at first limitless, crept towards his feet. The dew had
+gone from the dead grass and the sand was hot to his dry boots before he
+came back into the open space about the great banyan and the tents. And
+Kepple, refreshed by a night's rest and coffee, was wondering loudly
+where the devil he had gone.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE STORY
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST ~~ THE BOY GROWS UP
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Benham was the son of a schoolmaster. His father was assistant first at
+Cheltenham, and subsequently at Minchinghampton, and then he became
+head and later on sole proprietor of Martindale House, a high-class
+preparatory school at Seagate. He was extremely successful for some
+years, as success goes in the scholastic profession, and then disaster
+overtook him in the shape of a divorce. His wife, William Porphyry's
+mother, made the acquaintance of a rich young man named Nolan, who was
+recuperating at Seagate from the sequelae of snake-bite, malaria, and a
+gun accident in Brazil. She ran away with him, and she was divorced.
+She was, however, unable to marry him because he died at Wiesbaden
+only three days after the Reverend Harold Benham obtained his decree
+absolute. Instead, therefore, being a woman of great spirit, enterprise
+and sweetness, she married Godfrey Marayne, afterwards Sir Godfrey
+Marayne, the great London surgeon.
+
+Nolan was a dark, rather melancholy and sentimental young man, and he
+left about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs. Benham
+and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed himself to have
+injured. With this and a husband already distinguished, she returned
+presently to London, and was on the whole fairly well received there.
+
+It was upon the reverend gentleman at Seagate that the brunt of this
+divorce fell. There is perhaps a certain injustice in the fact that a
+schoolmaster who has lost his wife should also lose the more valuable
+proportion of his pupils, but the tone of thought in England is against
+any association of a schoolmaster with matrimonial irregularity. And
+also Mr. Benham remarried. It would certainly have been better for him
+if he could have produced a sister. His school declined and his efforts
+to resuscitate it only hastened its decay. Conceiving that he could now
+only appeal to the broader-minded, more progressive type of parent,
+he became an educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the
+curriculum with increasing frequency to the TIMES. He expended a
+considerable fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science laboratory
+and a fives court; he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teaching
+Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about a thousand volumes,
+including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late Lord Avebury,
+to the school equipment. None of these things did anything but enhance
+the suspicion of laxity his wife's escapade had created in the limited
+opulent and discreet class to which his establishment appealed. One
+boy who, under the influence of the Hundred Best Books, had quoted the
+ZEND-AVESTA to an irascible but influential grandfather, was withdrawn
+without notice or compensation in the middle of the term. It intensifies
+the tragedy of the Reverend Harold Benham's failure that in no
+essential respect did his school depart from the pattern of all other
+properly-conducted preparatory schools.
+
+In appearance he was near the average of scholastic English gentlemen.
+He displayed a manifest handsomeness somewhat weakened by disregard and
+disuse, a large moustache and a narrow high forehead. His rather
+tired brown eyes were magnified by glasses. He was an active man in
+unimportant things, with a love for the phrase "ship-shape," and he
+played cricket better than any one else on the staff. He walked in wide
+strides, and would sometimes use the tail of his gown on the blackboard.
+Like so many clergymen and schoolmasters, he had early distrusted
+his natural impulse in conversation, and had adopted the defensive
+precaution of a rather formal and sonorous speech, which habit had made
+a part of him. His general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up
+things that might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice,
+keeping up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was
+only too manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy of
+administration in a school that must not be too manifestly impoverished,
+keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and rather a flutterer
+of dovecots--with its method of manual training for example--keeping up
+ESPRIT DE CORPS and the manliness of himself and every one about him,
+keeping up his affection for his faithful second wife and his complete
+forgetfulness of and indifference to that spirit of distracting impulse
+and insubordination away there in London, who had once been his delight
+and insurmountable difficulty. "After my visits to her," wrote Benham,
+"he would show by a hundred little expressions and poses and acts how
+intensely he wasn't noting that anything of the sort had occurred."
+
+But one thing that from the outset the father seemed to have failed to
+keep up thoroughly was his intention to mould and dominate his son.
+
+The advent of his boy had been a tremendous event in the reverend
+gentleman's life. It is not improbable that his disposition to
+monopolize the pride of this event contributed to the ultimate
+disruption of his family. It left so few initiatives within the home to
+his wife. He had been an early victim to that wave of philoprogenitive
+and educational enthusiasm which distinguished the closing decade of the
+nineteenth century. He was full of plans in those days for the education
+of his boy, and the thought of the youngster played a large part in
+the series of complicated emotional crises with which he celebrated
+the departure of his wife, crises in which a number of old school and
+college friends very generously assisted--spending weekends at Seagate
+for this purpose, and mingling tobacco, impassioned handclasps and
+suchlike consolation with much patient sympathetic listening to his
+carefully balanced analysis of his feelings. He declared that his son
+was now his one living purpose in life, and he sketched out a scheme of
+moral and intellectual training that he subsequently embodied in five
+very stimulating and intimate articles for the SCHOOL WORLD, but never
+put into more than partial operation.
+
+"I have read my father's articles upon this subject," wrote Benham,
+"and I am still perplexed to measure just what I owe to him. Did he ever
+attempt this moral training he contemplated so freely? I don't think
+he did. I know now, I knew then, that he had something in his mind....
+There were one or two special walks we had together, he invited me
+to accompany him with a certain portentousness, and we would go out
+pregnantly making superficial remarks about the school cricket and
+return, discussing botany, with nothing said.
+
+"His heart failed him.
+
+"Once or twice, too, he seemed to be reaching out at me from the school
+pulpit.
+
+"I think that my father did manage to convey to me his belief that there
+were these fine things, honour, high aims, nobilities. If I did not get
+this belief from him then I do not know how I got it. But it was as if
+he hinted at a treasure that had got very dusty in an attic, a treasure
+which he hadn't himself been able to spend...."
+
+The father who had intended to mould his son ended by watching him grow,
+not always with sympathy or understanding. He was an overworked man
+assailed by many futile anxieties. One sees him striding about the
+establishment with his gown streaming out behind him urging on the
+groundsman or the gardener, or dignified, expounding the particular
+advantages of Seagate to enquiring parents, one sees him unnaturally
+cheerful and facetious at the midday dinner table, one imagines him
+keeping up high aspirations in a rather too hastily scribbled sermon in
+the school pulpit, or keeping up an enthusiasm for beautiful language in
+a badly-prepared lesson on Virgil, or expressing unreal indignation and
+unjustifiably exalted sentiments to evil doers, and one realizes his
+disadvantage against the quiet youngster whose retentive memory was
+storing up all these impressions for an ultimate judgment, and one
+understands, too, a certain relief that mingled with his undeniable
+emotion when at last the time came for young Benham, "the one living
+purpose" of his life, to be off to Minchinghampton and the next step in
+the mysterious ascent of the English educational system.
+
+Three times at least, and with an increased interval, the father wrote
+fine fatherly letters that would have stood the test of publication.
+Then his communications became comparatively hurried and matter-of-fact.
+His boy's return home for the holidays was always rather a stirring time
+for his private feelings, but he became more and more inexpressive. He
+would sometimes lay a hand on those growing shoulders and then withdraw
+it. They felt braced-up shoulders, stiffly inflexible or--they would
+wince. And when one has let the habit of indefinite feelings grow upon
+one, what is there left to say? If one did say anything one might be
+asked questions....
+
+One or two of the long vacations they spent abroad together. The last
+of these occasions followed Benham's convalescence at Montana and his
+struggle with the Bisse; the two went to Zermatt and did several peaks
+and crossed the Theodule, and it was clear that their joint expeditions
+were a strain upon both of them. The father thought the son reckless,
+unskilful, and impatient; the son found the father's insistence upon
+guides, ropes, precautions, the recognized way, the highest point and
+back again before you get a chill, and talk about it sagely but very,
+very modestly over pipes, tiresome. He wanted to wander in deserts of
+ice and see over the mountains, and discover what it is to be benighted
+on a precipice. And gradually he was becoming familiar with his father's
+repertory of Greek quotations. There was no breach between them, but
+each knew that holiday was the last they would ever spend together....
+
+The court had given the custody of young William Porphyry into his
+father's hands, but by a generous concession it was arranged that his
+mother should have him to see her for an hour or so five times a year.
+The Nolan legacy, however, coming upon the top of this, introduced
+a peculiar complication that provided much work for tactful
+intermediaries, and gave great and increasing scope for painful
+delicacies on the part of Mr. Benham as the boy grew up.
+
+"I see," said the father over his study pipe and with his glasses fixed
+on remote distances above the head of the current sympathizer, "I see
+more and more clearly that the tale of my sacrifices is not yet at an
+end.... In many respects he is like her.... Quick. Too quick.... He must
+choose. But I know his choice. Yes, yes,--I'm not blind. She's worked
+upon him.... I have done what I could to bring out the manhood in him.
+Perhaps it will bear the strain.... It will be a wrench, old man--God
+knows."
+
+He did his very best to make it a wrench.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Benham's mother, whom he saw quarterly and also on the first of May,
+because it was her birthday, touched and coloured his imagination far
+more than his father did. She was now Lady Marayne, and a prominent,
+successful, and happy little lady. Her dereliction had been forgiven
+quite soon, and whatever whisper of it remained was very completely
+forgotten during the brief period of moral kindliness which followed
+the accession of King Edward the Seventh. It no doubt contributed to
+her social reinstatement that her former husband was entirely devoid
+of social importance, while, on the other hand, Sir Godfrey Marayne's
+temporary monopoly of the caecal operation which became so fashionable
+in the last decade of Queen Victoria's reign as to be practically
+epidemic, created a strong feeling in her favour.
+
+She was blue-eyed and very delicately complexioned, quick-moving, witty,
+given to little storms of clean enthusiasm; she loved handsome things,
+brave things, successful things, and the respect and affection of all
+the world. She did quite what she liked upon impulse, and nobody ever
+thought ill of her.
+
+Her family were the Mantons of Blent, quite good west-country people.
+She had broken away from them before she was twenty to marry Benham,
+whom she had idealized at a tennis party. He had talked of his work and
+she had seen it in a flash, the noblest work in the world, him at
+his daily divine toil and herself a Madonna surrounded by a troupe of
+Blessed Boys--all of good family, some of quite the best. For a time she
+had kept it up even more than he had, and then Nolan had distracted her
+with a realization of the heroism that goes to the ends of the earth.
+She became sick with desire for the forests of Brazil, and the Pacific,
+and--a peak in Darien. Immediately the school was frowsty beyond
+endurance, and for the first time she let herself perceive how
+dreadfully a gentleman and a scholar can smell of pipes and tobacco.
+Only one course lay open to a woman of spirit....
+
+For a year she did indeed live like a woman of spirit, and it was at
+Nolan's bedside that Marayne was first moved to admiration. She was
+plucky. All men love a plucky woman.
+
+Sir Godfrey Marayne smelt a good deal of antiseptic soap, but he talked
+in a way that amused her, and he trusted as well as adored her. She did
+what she liked with his money, her own money, and her son's trust money,
+and she did very well. From the earliest Benham's visits were to a
+gracious presence amidst wealthy surroundings. The transit from the
+moral blamelessness of Seagate had an entirely misleading effect of
+ascent.
+
+Their earlier encounters became rather misty in his memory; they
+occurred at various hotels in Seagate. Afterwards he would go, first
+taken by a governess, and later going alone, to Charing Cross, where he
+would be met, in earlier times by a maid and afterwards by a deferential
+manservant who called him "Sir," and conveyed, sometimes in a hansom cab
+and later in a smart brougham, by Trafalgar Square, Lower Regent Street,
+Piccadilly, and streets of increasing wealth and sublimity to Sir
+Godfrey's house in Desborough Street. Very naturally he fell into
+thinking of these discreet and well-governed West End streets as a part
+of his mother's atmosphere.
+
+The house had a dignified portico, and always before he had got down
+to the pavement the door opened agreeably and a second respectful
+manservant stood ready. Then came the large hall, with its noiseless
+carpets and great Chinese jars, its lacquered cabinets and the wide
+staircase, and floating down the wide staircase, impatient to greet him,
+light and shining as a flower petal, sweet and welcoming, radiating a
+joyfulness as cool and clear as a dewy morning, came his mother. "WELL,
+little man, my son," she would cry in her happy singing voice, "WELL?"
+
+So he thought she must always be, but indeed these meetings meant very
+much to her, she dressed for them and staged them, she perceived the
+bright advantages of her rarity and she was quite determined to have
+her son when the time came to possess him. She kissed him but not
+oppressively, she caressed him cleverly; it was only on these rare
+occasions that he was ever kissed or caressed, and she talked to his shy
+boyishness until it felt a more spirited variety of manhood. "What have
+you been doing?" she asked, "since I saw you last."
+
+She never said he had grown, but she told him he looked tall; and though
+the tea was a marvellous display it was never an obtrusive tea, it
+wasn't poked at a fellow; a various plenty flowed well within reach of
+one's arm, like an agreeable accompaniment to their conversation.
+
+"What have you done? All sorts of brave things? Do you swim now? I can
+swim. Oh! I can swim half a mile. Some day we will swim races together.
+Why not? And you ride?...
+
+"The horse bolted--and you stuck on? Did you squeak? I stick on, but I
+HAVE to squeak. But you--of course, No! you mustn't. I'm just a little
+woman. And I ride big horses...."
+
+And for the end she had invented a characteristic little ceremony.
+
+She would stand up in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders
+and look into his face.
+
+"Clean eyes?" she would say, "--still?"
+
+Then she would take his ears in her little firm hands and kiss very
+methodically his eyes and his forehead and his cheeks and at last his
+lips. Her own eyes would suddenly brim bright with tears.
+
+"GO," she would say.
+
+That was the end.
+
+It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
+fairyland to this grey world again.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The contrast between Lady Marayne's pretty amenities and the good
+woman at Seagate who urged herself almost hourly to forget that William
+Porphyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair. The second Mrs.
+Benham's conscientious spirit and a certain handsome ability about her
+fitted her far more than her predecessor for the onerous duties of a
+schoolmaster's wife, but whatever natural buoyancy she possessed was
+outweighed by an irrepressible conviction derived from an episcopal
+grandparent that the remarriage of divorced persons is sinful, and by a
+secret but well-founded doubt whether her husband loved her with a truly
+romantic passion. She might perhaps have borne either of these troubles
+singly, but the two crushed her spirit.
+
+Her temperament was not one that goes out to meet happiness. She had
+reluctant affections and suspected rather than welcomed the facility
+of other people's. Her susceptibility to disagreeable impressions was
+however very ample, and life was fenced about with protections for her
+"feelings." It filled young Benham with inexpressible indignations that
+his sweet own mother, so gay, so brightly cheerful that even her tears
+were stars, was never to be mentioned in his stepmother's presence, and
+it was not until he had fully come to years of reflection that he began
+to realize with what honesty, kindness and patience this naturally not
+very happy lady had nursed, protected, mended for and generally mothered
+him.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+As Benham grew to look manly and bear himself with pride, his mother's
+affection for him blossomed into a passion. She made him come down to
+London from Cambridge as often as she could; she went about with him;
+she made him squire her to theatres and take her out to dinners and
+sup with her at the Carlton, and in the summer she had him with her at
+Chexington Manor, the Hertfordshire house Sir Godfrey had given her.
+And always when they parted she looked into his eyes to see if they were
+still clean--whatever she meant by that--and she kissed his forehead and
+cheeks and eyes and lips. She began to make schemes for his career, she
+contrived introductions she judged would be useful to him later.
+
+Everybody found the relationship charming. Some of the more
+conscientious people, it is true, pretended to think that the Reverend
+Harold Benham was a first husband and long since dead, but that was all.
+As a matter of fact, in his increasingly futile way he wasn't, either at
+Seagate or in the Educational Supplement of the TIMES. But even the
+most conscientious of us are not obliged to go to Seagate or read the
+Educational Supplement of the TIMES.
+
+Lady Marayne's plans for her son's future varied very pleasantly. She
+was an industrious reader of biographies, and more particularly of the
+large fair biographies of the recently contemporary; they mentioned
+people she knew, they recalled scenes, each sowed its imaginative crop
+upon her mind, a crop that flourished and flowered until a newer growth
+came to oust it. She saw her son a diplomat, a prancing pro-consul, an
+empire builder, a trusted friend of the august, the bold leader of new
+movements, the saviour of ancient institutions, the youngest, brightest,
+modernest of prime ministers--or a tremendously popular poet. As a rule
+she saw him unmarried--with a wonderful little mother at his elbow.
+Sometimes in romantic flashes he was adored by German princesses
+or eloped with Russian grand-duchesses! But such fancies were HORS
+D'OEUVRE. The modern biography deals with the career. Every project was
+bright, every project had GO--tremendous go. And they all demanded a
+hero, debonnaire and balanced. And Benham, as she began to perceive,
+wasn't balanced. Something of his father had crept into him, a touch
+of moral stiffness. She knew the flavour of that so well. It was a
+stumbling, an elaboration, a spoil-sport and weakness. She tried not to
+admit to herself that even in the faintest degree it was there. But it
+was there.
+
+"Tell me all that you are doing NOW," she said to him one afternoon when
+she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington Manor.
+"How do you like Cambridge? Are you making friends? Have you joined that
+thing--the Union, is it?--and delivered your maiden speech? If you're
+for politics, Poff, that's your game. Have you begun it?"
+
+She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red cushions in the punt,
+a little curled-up figure of white, with her sweet pale animated face
+warmed by the reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like little
+friendly heavens. And he, lean, and unconsciously graceful, sat at her
+feet and admired her beyond measure, and rejoiced that now at last
+they were going to be ever so much together, and doubted if it would be
+possible ever to love any other woman so much as he did her.
+
+He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the undergraduate
+life he was leading, but he found it difficult. All sorts of things that
+seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of drawing in the
+peculiar atmosphere she created about her. All sorts of clumsiness and
+youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt she wouldn't accept,
+couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her to accept. Before
+they could come before her they must wear a bravery. He couldn't, for
+instance, tell her how Billy Prothero, renouncing vanity and all social
+pretension, had worn a straw hat into November and the last stages of
+decay, and how it had been burnt by a special commission ceremonially in
+the great court. He couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer
+and tobacco and high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into
+the small hours. A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness
+through which the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he
+concealed from her. What remained to tell was--attenuated. He could
+not romance. So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines. She tried to
+inspire a son who seemed most unaccountably up to nothing.
+
+"You must make good friends," she said. "Isn't young Lord Breeze at
+your college? His mother the other day told me he was. And Sir Freddy
+Quenton's boy. And there are both the young Baptons at Cambridge."
+
+He knew one of the Baptons.
+
+"Poff," she said suddenly, "has it ever occurred to you what you are
+going to do afterwards. Do you know you are going to be quite well off?"
+
+Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. "My father said something.
+He was rather vague. It wasn't his affair--that kind of thing."
+
+"You will be quite well off," she repeated, without any complicating
+particulars. "You will be so well off that it will be possible for you
+to do anything almost that you like in the world. Nothing will tie you.
+Nothing...."
+
+"But--HOW well off?"
+
+"You will have several thousands a year."
+
+"Thousands?"
+
+"Yes. Why not?"
+
+"But--Mother, this is rather astounding.... Does this mean there are
+estates somewhere, responsibilities?"
+
+"It is just money. Investments."
+
+"You know, I've imagined--. I've thought always I should have to DO
+something."
+
+"You MUST do something, Poff. But it needn't be for a living. The world
+is yours without that. And so you see you've got to make plans. You've
+got to know the sort of people who'll have things in their hands. You've
+got to keep out of--holes and corners. You've got to think of Parliament
+and abroad. There's the army, there's diplomacy. There's the Empire. You
+can be a Cecil Rhodes if you like. You can be a Winston...."
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Perhaps it was only the innate eagerness of Lady Marayne which made
+her feel disappointed in her son's outlook upon life. He did not choose
+among his glittering possibilities, he did not say what he was going to
+be, proconsul, ambassador, statesman, for days. And he talked VAGUELY of
+wanting to do something fine, but all in a fog. A boy of nearly nineteen
+ought to have at least the beginnings of SAVOIR FAIRE.
+
+Was he in the right set? Was he indeed in the right college? Trinity,
+by his account, seemed a huge featureless place--and might he not
+conceivably be LOST in it? In those big crowds one had to insist upon
+oneself. Poff never insisted upon himself--except quite at the wrong
+moment. And there was this Billy 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
+affections of men. So that it is among its foremost distinctions that
+its heart is steeled...."
+
+There this odd fragment ended and White was left to resume the
+interrupted autobiography.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+What moods, what passions, what nights of despair and gathering storms
+of anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are buried
+and hidden and implied in every love story! What a waste is there of
+exquisite things! So each spring sees a million glorious beginnings, a
+sunlit heaven in every opening leaf, warm perfection in every stirring
+egg, hope and fear and beauty beyond computation in every forest tree;
+and in the autumn before the snows come they have all gone, of all
+that incalculable abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure,
+excitement and deliciousness, there is scarcely more to be found than
+a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould or a rotting
+feather....
+
+White held the ten or twelve pencilled pages that told how Benham and
+Amanda drifted into antagonism and estrangement and as he held it he
+thought of the laughter and delight they must have had together, the
+exquisite excitements of her eye, the racing colour of her cheek, the
+gleams of light upon her skin, the flashes of wit between them, the
+sense of discovery, the high rare paths they had followed, the pools in
+which they had swum together. And now it was all gone into nothingness,
+there was nothing left of it, nothing at all, but just those sheets of
+statement, and it may be, stored away in one single mind, like things
+forgotten in an attic, a few neglected faded memories....
+
+And even those few sheets of statement were more than most love leaves
+behind it. For a time White would not read them. They lay neglected on
+his knee as he sat back in Benham's most comfortable chair and enjoyed
+an entirely beautiful melancholy.
+
+White too had seen and mourned the spring.
+
+Indeed, poor dear! he had seen and mourned several springs....
+
+With a sigh he took up the manuscript and read Benham's desiccated story
+of intellectual estrangement, and how in the end he had decided to
+leave his wife and go out alone upon that journey of inquiry he had been
+planning when first he met her.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Amanda had come back to England in a state of extravagantly vigorous
+womanhood. Benham's illness, though it lasted only two or three
+weeks, gave her a sense of power and leadership for which she had been
+struggling instinctively ever since they came together. For a time at
+Locarno he was lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she formed her
+bright and limited plans for London. Benham had no plans as yet but
+only a sense of divergence, as though he was being pulled in opposite
+directions by two irresistible forces. To her it was plain that he
+needed occupation, some distinguished occupation, and she could imagine
+nothing better for him than a political career. She perceived he had
+personality, that he stood out among men so that his very silences were
+effective. She loved him immensely, and she had tremendous ambitions for
+him and through him.
+
+And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with appetite.
+Her soul thirsted for London. It was like some enormous juicy fruit
+waiting for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large enough to give
+her avidity the sense of enough. She felt it waiting for her, household,
+servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly delight of buying and
+possessing things, the opera, first-nights, picture exhibitions, great
+dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties, crowds seen from a point
+of vantage, the carriage in a long string of fine carriages with the
+lamplit multitude peering, Amanda in a thousand bright settings, in a
+thousand various dresses. She had had love; it had been glorious, it
+was still glorious, but her love-making became now at times almost
+perfunctory in the contemplation of these approaching delights and
+splendours and excitements.
+
+She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in Benham's head; but she
+was a realist. She did not see why ideas should stand in the way of a
+career. Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind. One talks
+ideas, but THE THING THAT IS, IS THE THING THAT IS. And though she
+believed that Benham had a certain strength of character of his own, she
+had that sort of confidence in his love for her and in the power of her
+endearments that has in it the assurance of a faint contempt. She had
+mingled pride and sense in the glorious realization of the power over
+him that her wit and beauty gave her. She had held him faint with her
+divinity, intoxicated with the pride of her complete possession, and she
+did not dream that the moment when he should see clearly that she could
+deliberately use these ultimate delights to rule and influence him,
+would be the end of their splendour and her power. Her nature, which
+was just a nest of vigorous appetites, was incapable of suspecting his
+gathering disillusionment until it burst upon her.
+
+Now with her attention set upon London ahead he could observe her.
+In the beginning he had never seemed to be observing her at all, they
+dazzled one another; it seemed extraordinary now to him to note how much
+he had been able to disregard. There were countless times still when he
+would have dropped his observation and resumed that mutual exaltation
+very gladly, but always now other things possessed her mind....
+
+There was still an immense pleasure for him in her vigour; there was
+something delightful in her pounce, even when she was pouncing on things
+superficial, vulgar or destructive. She made him understand and share
+the excitement of a big night at the opera, the glitter and prettiness
+of a smart restaurant, the clustering little acute adventures of a great
+reception of gay people, just as she had already made him understand and
+sympathize with dogs. She picked up the art world where he had laid
+it down, and she forced him to feel dense and slow before he rebelled
+against her multitudinous enthusiasms and admirations. South Harting had
+had its little group of artistic people; it is not one of your sleepy
+villages, and she slipped back at once into the movement. Those were
+the great days of John, the days before the Post Impressionist outbreak.
+John, Orpen, Tonks, she bought them with vigour. Artistic circles began
+to revolve about her. Very rapidly she was in possession.... And among
+other desirable things she had, it seemed, pounced upon and captured
+Lady Marayne.
+
+At any rate it was clear that that awful hostile silence and aloofness
+was to end. Benham never quite mastered how it was done. But Amanda
+had gone in one morning to Desborough Street, very sweetly and
+chastely dressed, had abased herself and announced a possible (though
+subsequently disproved) grandchild. And she had appreciated the little
+lady so highly and openly, she had so instantly caught and reproduced
+her tone, that her success, though only temporary in its completeness,
+was immediate. In the afternoon Benham was amazed by the apparition of
+his mother amidst the scattered unsettled furnishings of the new home
+Amanda had chosen in Lancaster Gate. He was in the hall, the door stood
+open awaiting packing-cases from a van without. In the open doorway she
+shone, looking the smallest of dainty things. There was no effect of her
+coming but only of her having arrived there, as a little blue butterfly
+will suddenly alight on a flower.
+
+"Well, Poff!" said Lady Marayne, ignoring abysses, "What are you up to
+now, Poff? Come and embrace me...."
+
+"No, not so," she said, "stiffest of sons...."
+
+She laid hold of his ears in the old fashion and kissed one eye.
+
+"Congratulations, dear little Poff. Oh! congratulations! In heaps. I'm
+so GLAD."
+
+Now what was that for?
+
+And then Amanda came out upon the landing upstairs, saw the encounter
+with an involuntary cry of joy, and came downstairs with arms wide open.
+It was the first intimation he had of their previous meeting. He was for
+some minutes a stunned, entirely inadequate Benham....
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a few people in the
+Hampstead Garden suburb that she had not the slightest wish to know, and
+then very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of people. The artistic
+circle brought in people, Lady Marayne brought in people; they spread.
+It was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young couple; he would
+certainly do something considerable presently, and she was bright and
+daring, jolly to look at and excellent fun, and, when you came to talk
+to her, astonishingly well informed. They passed from one hostess's hand
+to another: they reciprocated. The Clynes people and the Rushtones took
+her up; Mr. Evesham was amused by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed
+her charm like a trumpet, the Young Liberal people made jealous
+advances, Lord Moggeridge found she listened well, she lit one of the
+brightest weekend parties Lady Marayne had ever gathered at Chexington.
+And her descriptions of recent danger and adventure in Albania not
+only entertained her hearers but gave her just that flavour of personal
+courage which completes the fascination of a young woman. People in the
+gaps of a halting dinner-table conversation would ask: "Have you met
+Mrs. Benham?"
+
+Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking. A smiling and successful young
+woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl with a
+good lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely engaged, or
+at least friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr. Rathbone-Sanders,
+may be forgiven if in the full tide of her success she does not
+altogether grasp the intention of her husband's discourse. It seemed to
+her that he was obsessed by a responsibility for civilization and the
+idea that he was aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined to doubt
+whether he was justified in calling himself aristocratic; at the best
+his mother was county-stuff; but still if he did there was no great
+harm in it nowadays.) Clearly his line was Tory-Democracy, social reform
+through the House of Lords and friendly intimacy with the more spirited
+young peers. And it was only very slowly and reluctantly that she
+was forced to abandon this satisfactory solution of his problem. She
+reproduced all the equipment and comforts of his Finacue Street study in
+their new home, she declared constantly that she would rather forego
+any old social thing than interfere with his work, she never made him
+go anywhere with her without first asking if his work permitted it. To
+relieve him of the burthen of such social attentions she even made a fag
+or so. The making of fags out of manifestly stricken men, the keeping
+of tamed and hopeless admirers, seemed to her to be the most natural and
+reasonable of feminine privileges. They did their useful little services
+until it pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own. That was how she
+put it....
+
+But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
+ignored. He was manifestly losing his temper with her. There was a
+novel austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face on
+certain occasions that lingered in her memory.
+
+He was indeed making elaborate explanations. He said that what he wanted
+to do was to understand "the collective life of the world," and that
+this was not to be done in a West-End study. He had an extraordinary
+contempt, it seemed, for both sides in the drama of British politics. He
+had extravagant ideas of beginning in some much more fundamental way.
+He wanted to understand this "collective life of the world," because
+ultimately he wanted to help control it. (Was there ever such nonsense?)
+The practical side of this was serious enough, however; he was back at
+his old idea of going round the earth. Later on that might be rather
+a jolly thing to do, but not until they had struck root a little more
+surely in London.
+
+And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she began
+to realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon this vague
+extravagant research, that all this work she had been doing to make
+a social place for him in London was as nothing to him, that he was
+thinking of himself as separable from her....
+
+"But, Cheetah! How can you leave your spotless leopard? You would howl
+in the lonely jungle!"
+
+"Possibly I shall. But I am going."
+
+"Then I shall come."
+
+"No." He considered her reasons. "You see you are not interested."
+
+"But I am."
+
+"Not as I am. You would turn it all into a jolly holiday. You don't want
+to see things as I want to do. You want romance. All the world is a show
+for you. As a show I can't endure it. I want to lay hands on it."
+
+"But, Cheetah!" she said, "this is separation."
+
+"You will have your life here. And I shall come back."
+
+"But, Cheetah! How can we be separated?"
+
+"We are separated," he said.
+
+Her eyes became round with astonishment. Then her face puckered.
+
+"Cheetah!" she cried in a voice of soft distress, "I love you. What do
+you mean?"
+
+And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and
+shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms....
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+"Don't say we are separated," she whispered, putting her still wet face
+close to his.
+
+"No. We're mates," he answered softly, with his arm about her.
+
+"How could we ever keep away from each uvver?" she whispered.
+
+He was silent.
+
+"How COULD we?"
+
+He answered aloud. "Amanda," he said, "I mean to go round the world."
+
+She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.
+
+"What is to become of me," she asked suddenly in a voice of despair,
+"while you go round the world? If you desert me in London," she said,
+"if you shame me by deserting me in London-- If you leave me, I will
+never forgive you, Cheetah! Never." Then in an almost breathless voice,
+and as if she spoke to herself, "Never in all my days."
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children. There was
+nothing involuntary about Amanda. "Soon," she said, "we must begin to
+think of children. Not just now, but a little later. It's good to travel
+and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are children in the
+background. No woman is really content until she is a mother...." And
+for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said about that solitary journey
+round the world.
+
+But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk. She set
+herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there
+were other men in the world. The convenient fags, sometimes a little
+embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought into the
+light before Benham's eyes. Most of them were much older men than
+himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no sane man need
+be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a contemporary, Sir
+Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood and a suggestion of
+Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much in love with Amanda and
+of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible difference of manner that
+made Benham faintly uneasy. He was ashamed of the feeling. Easton it
+seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine honour, so that Amanda could trust
+herself with him to an extent that would have been inadvisable with men
+of a commoner substance, and he had a gift of understanding and sympathy
+that was almost feminine; he could cheer one up when one was lonely and
+despondent. For Amanda was so methodical in the arrangement of her time
+that even in the full rush of a London season she could find an hour
+now and then for being lonely and despondent. And he was a liberal and
+understanding purchaser of the ascendant painters; he understood
+that side of Amanda's interests, a side upon which Benham was notably
+deficient....
+
+"Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?--Sir Philip
+Easton?" said Lady Marayne.
+
+Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said
+nothing.
+
+"When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her," said Lady Marayne.
+
+"No," said Benham after consideration. "I don't intend to be a
+wife-herd."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Wife-herd--same as goat-herd."
+
+"Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff--nowadays."
+
+"It's exactly what I mean. I can understand the kind of curator's
+interest an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but
+to spend my days looking after one person who ought to be able to look
+after herself--"
+
+"She's very young."
+
+"She's quite grown up. Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid."
+
+"If you leave her about and go abroad--"
+
+"Has she been talking to you, mother?"
+
+"The thing shows."
+
+"But about my going abroad?"
+
+"She said something, my little Poff."
+
+Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference
+was something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking
+inordinately. He weighed his words before he spoke again. "If Amanda
+chooses to threaten me with a sort of conditional infidelity, I don't
+see that it ought to change the plans I have made for my life...."
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+"No aristocrat has any right to be jealous," Benham wrote. "If he
+chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or
+naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel
+her to go his way. What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion
+through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the
+use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no inherent will to
+seek and live the aristocratic life?
+
+"But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call...."
+
+He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
+Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of her,
+the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly
+resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of thinking her
+over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been
+preoccupied with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a
+sense of extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her,
+of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone
+conclusions. He was ready now even with the details of his project. She
+should go on with her life in London exactly as she had planned it. He
+would take fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might
+spend without check or stint as it pleased her. He was going round the
+world for one or two years. It was even possible he would not go alone.
+There was a man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don
+called Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out
+his ideas....
+
+To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should
+happen.
+
+She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily
+told her that this only hardened his heart. She perceived that she must
+make a softer appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive and
+imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the
+first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to
+bear a child. "He cannot go if I am going to have a child," she told
+herself. But that would mean illness, and for illness in herself or
+others Amanda had the intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet even
+illness would be better than this intolerable publication of her
+husband's ability to leave her side....
+
+She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith
+to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him. Her
+dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I want to have children, but I must go round the world
+none the less."
+
+She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind. She
+argued with persistence and repetition. And then suddenly so that she
+was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.
+
+She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and she
+was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-forgetful;
+she was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale green, that set off
+her slim erect body and the strong clear lines of her neck and shoulders
+very beautifully, some greenish stones caught a light from without and
+flashed soft whispering gleams from amidst the misty darkness of her
+hair. She was going to Lady Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for
+a dinner at the House with some young Liberals at which he was to meet
+two representative Indians with a grievance from Bengal. Husband and
+wife had but a few moments together. She asked about his company and he
+told her.
+
+"They will tell you about India."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She stood for a moment looking out across the lights and the dark green
+trees, and then she turned to him.
+
+"Why cannot I come with you?" she asked with sudden passion. "Why cannot
+I see the things you want to see?"
+
+"I tell you you are not interested. You would only be interested through
+me. That would not help me. I should just be dealing out my premature
+ideas to you. If you cared as I care, if you wanted to know as I want to
+know, it would be different. But you don't. It isn't your fault that
+you don't. It happens so. And there is no good in forced interest, in
+prescribed discovery."
+
+"Cheetah," she asked, "what is it that you want to know--that I don't
+care for?"
+
+"I want to know about the world. I want to rule the world."
+
+"So do I."
+
+"No, you want to have the world."
+
+"Isn't it the same?"
+
+"No. You're a greedier thing than I am, you Black Leopard you--standing
+there in the dusk. You're a stronger thing. Don't you know you're
+stronger? When I am with you, you carry your point, because you are more
+concentrated, more definite, less scrupulous. When you run beside me
+you push me out of my path.... You've made me afraid of you.... And so
+I won't go with you, Leopard. I go alone. It isn't because I don't love
+you. I love you too well. It isn't because you aren't beautiful and
+wonderful...."
+
+"But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for this that you want than
+you care for me."
+
+Benham thought of it. "I suppose I do," he said.
+
+"What is it that you want? Still I don't understand."
+
+Her voice had the break of one who would keep reasonable in spite of
+pain.
+
+"I ought to tell you."
+
+"Yes, you ought to tell me."
+
+"I wonder if I can tell you," he said very thoughtfully, and rested his
+hands on his hips. "I shall seem ridiculous to you."
+
+"You ought to tell me."
+
+"I think what I want is to be king of the world."
+
+She stood quite still staring at him.
+
+"I do not know how I can tell you of it. Amanda, do you remember those
+bodies--you saw those bodies--those mutilated men?"
+
+"I saw them," said Amanda.
+
+"Well. Is it nothing to you that those things happen?"
+
+"They must happen."
+
+"No. They happen because there are no kings but pitiful kings. They
+happen because the kings love their Amandas and do not care."
+
+"But what can YOU do, Cheetah?"
+
+"Very little. But I can give my life and all my strength. I can give all
+I can give."
+
+"But how? How can you help it--help things like that massacre?"
+
+"I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong with my world and rule it
+and set it right."
+
+"YOU! Alone."
+
+"Other men do as much. Every one who does so helps others to do so. You
+see--... In this world one may wake in the night and one may resolve to
+be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king. Does that sound
+foolishness to you? Anyhow, it's fair that I should tell you, though
+you count me a fool. This--this kingship--this dream of the night--is
+my life. It is the very core of me. Much more than you are. More than
+anything else can be. I mean to be a king in this earth. KING. I'm not
+mad.... I see the world staggering from misery to misery and there is
+little wisdom, less rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things
+come by chance and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my
+world and I am responsible. Every man to whom this light has come
+is responsible. As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your
+kingship is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no delight,
+except in work, in service, in utmost effort. As far as I can do it I
+will rule my world. I cannot abide in this smug city, I cannot
+endure its self-complacency, its routine, its gloss of success, its
+rottenness.... I shall do little, perhaps I shall do nothing, but what I
+can understand and what I can do I will do. Think of that wild beautiful
+country we saw, and the mean misery, the filth and the warring cruelty
+of the life that lives there, tragedy, tragedy without dignity; and
+think, too, of the limitless ugliness here, and of Russia slipping
+from disorder to massacre, and China, that sea of human beings,
+sliding steadily to disaster. Do you think these are only things in the
+newspapers? To me at any rate they are not things in newspapers; they
+are pain and failure, they are torment, they are blood and dust and
+misery. They haunt me day and night. Even if it is utterly absurd I will
+still do my utmost. It IS absurd. I'm a madman and you and my mother
+are sensible people.... And I will go my way.... I don't care for the
+absurdity. I don't care a rap."
+
+He stopped abruptly.
+
+"There you have it, Amanda. It's rant, perhaps. Sometimes I feel it's
+rant. And yet it's the breath of life to me.... There you are.... At
+last I've been able to break silence and tell you...."
+
+He stopped with something like a sob and stood regarding the dusky
+mystery of her face. She stood quite still, she was just a beautiful
+outline in the twilight, her face was an indistinctness under the black
+shadow of her hair, with eyes that were two patches of darkness.
+
+He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the time.
+His voice changed. "Well--if you provoke a man enough, you see he makes
+speeches. Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda. Here we are talking instead
+of going to our dinners. The car has been waiting ten minutes."
+
+Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas....
+
+A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly. In an instant she
+had ceased to plot against him. A vast wave of emotion swept her forward
+to a resolution that astonished her.
+
+"Cheetah!" she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed,
+"give me one thing. Stay until June with me."
+
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.
+
+"Because--now--no, I don't want to keep you any more--I am not trying to
+hold you any more.... I want...."
+
+She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.
+
+"Cheetah," she whispered almost inaudibly, "Cheetah--I didn't
+understand. But now--. I want to bear your child."
+
+He was astonished. "Old Leopard!" he said.
+
+"No," she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing
+very close to him, "Queen---if I can be--to your King."
+
+"You want to bear me a child!" he whispered, profoundly moved.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of Commons
+came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer. And over against
+Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of those men who
+know that their judgments are quoted.
+
+"Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?" he asked of
+his neighbour in confidential undertones....
+
+He tittered. "I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY aware
+that the man to her left is talking to her...."
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was now a
+fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer....
+
+All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in
+some way Prothero was necessary to his mind. It was as if he looked to
+Prothero to keep him real. He suspected even while he obeyed that upward
+flourish which was his own essential characteristic. He had a peculiar
+feeling that somehow that upward bias would betray him; that from
+exaltation he might presently float off, into the higher, the better,
+and so to complete unreality. He fled from priggishness and the terror
+of such sublimity alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation to so many
+things Prothero in a peculiar distinctive manner SAW. He had less
+self-control than Benham, less integrity of purpose, less concentration,
+and things that were before his eyes were by the very virtue of these
+defects invariably visible to him. Things were able to insist upon
+themselves with him. Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted
+his purpose too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them. He
+repudiated inconvenient facts. He mastered and made his world; Prothero
+accepted and recorded his. Benham was a will towards the universe where
+Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive activity.
+And it was because of his realization of this profound difference
+between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking Prothero with
+him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision--rather like that
+eye the Graiae used to hand one another....
+
+After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms in
+Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue
+sky, seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholarship pervaded them--a
+little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not
+completely forgotten. Prothero's door had been locked against the world,
+and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only
+apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better
+part of a second. He might have been asleep, he might have been doing
+anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men
+exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before
+Benham' s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host
+to the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects
+of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the
+distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red,
+incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an
+air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE, its cover
+proclaimed....
+
+His host followed that glance and blushed. "They send me all sorts of
+inappropriate stuff to review," he remarked.
+
+And then he was denouncing celibacy.
+
+The transition wasn't very clear to Benham. His mind had been
+preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project.
+Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between his
+teeth and bolted. He began to say the most shocking things right away,
+so that Benham's attention was caught in spite of himself.
+
+"Inflammatory classics."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me," said Prothero. "I can't
+stand it any longer."
+
+It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world,
+such a statement might have been credible. Even in his own life,--it was
+now indeed a remote, forgotten stage--there had been something distantly
+akin....
+
+"You're going to marry?"
+
+"I must."
+
+"Who's the lady, Billy?"
+
+"I don't know. Venus."
+
+His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly. "So far as I know,
+it is Venus Anadyomene." A flash of laughter passed across his face
+and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. "I like her
+best, anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! I feel that almost any of them--"
+
+"Tut, tut!" said Benham.
+
+Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.
+
+"Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face? I
+am not pronouncing an immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. I
+am telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I feel. I want--Venus.
+I don't want her to talk to or anything of that sort.... I have been
+studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning,
+instead of doing any work. Would you like to see it?... NO!...
+
+"This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad. It is a peculiarly
+erotic spring. I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend
+to ordinary conversation. These feelings, I understand, are by no means
+peculiar to myself.... No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now
+that the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in you said, 'How
+are you?' I am telling you how I am. You brought it on yourself. Well--I
+am--inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious convictions to assist
+me either to endure or deny this--this urgency. And so why should I deny
+it? It's one of our chief problems here. The majority of my fellow
+dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and
+combination-room are in just the same case as myself. The fever in
+oneself detects the fever in others. I know their hidden thoughts. Their
+fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts. Each covers his
+miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference. A
+tattered cloak.... Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible
+vice of continence--"
+
+"Billy, what's the matter with you?"
+
+Prothero grimaced impatience. "Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a
+humbug, Benham?" he screamed, and in screaming became calmer. "Nature
+taunts me, maddens me. My life is becoming a hell of shame. 'Get out
+from all these books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.' The Flesh,
+Benham. Yes--I insist--the Flesh. Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any
+man a pure spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage,
+with too much port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked
+Aspasia."
+
+"Mutual, perhaps, Billy."
+
+"Oh! you can sneer!"
+
+"Well, clearly--Saint Paul is my authority--it's marriage, Billy."
+
+Prothero had walked to the window. He turned round.
+
+"I CAN'T marry," he said. "The trouble has gone too far. I've lost my
+nerve in the presence of women. I don't like them any more. They come
+at one--done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about
+all sorts of things that don't matter...." He surveyed his friend's
+thoughtful attitude. "I'm getting to hate women, Benham. I'm beginning
+now to understand the bitterness of spinsters against men. I'm beginning
+to grasp the unkindliness of priests. The perpetual denial. To you,
+happily married, a woman is just a human being. You can talk to her,
+like her, you can even admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge
+against her...."
+
+He sat down abruptly.
+
+Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered him.
+
+"Billy! this is delusion," he said. "What's come over you?"
+
+"I'm telling you," said Prothero.
+
+"No," said Benham.
+
+Prothero awaited some further utterance.
+
+"I'm looking for the cause of it. It's feeding, Billy. It's port and
+stimulants where there is no scope for action. It's idleness. I begin to
+see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser."
+
+"Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers. Look at that filing
+system like an arsenal of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow
+not idleness."
+
+"There's still bodily idleness. No. That's your trouble. You're stuffy.
+You've enlarged your liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning after
+an extravagant breakfast--. And peep and covet."
+
+"Just eggs and bacon!"
+
+"Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. Come out of it, Billy,
+and get aired."
+
+"How can one?"
+
+"Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!"
+
+"It's an infernally warm morning.
+
+"Walk with me to Grantchester."
+
+"We might go by boat. You could row."
+
+"WALK."
+
+"I ought to do these papers."
+
+"You weren't doing them."
+
+"No...."
+
+"Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours
+is--horrid--and just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come
+with me to Russia and about the world. I'm going to leave my wife--"
+
+"Leave your wife!"
+
+"Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead
+you are in this disgusting state. I've never met anything in my life so
+hot and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one
+talk to you?"
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+"You pull things down to your own level," said Benham as they went
+through the heat to Grantchester.
+
+"I pull them down to truth," panted Prothero.
+
+"Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and
+discipline and training some sort of falsity!"
+
+"Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride."
+
+For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....
+
+The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the
+background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
+
+"I'm not talking of Love," he said, remaining persistently outrageous.
+"I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of
+arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is
+physically possible....
+
+"But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?"
+
+"Then why don't we up and find out?" said Billy.
+
+He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that
+surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came
+to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our
+indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with
+awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in
+particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to
+traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? "What is the wisdom
+of the ages?" said Prothero. "Think of the corners where that wisdom was
+born.... Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise
+man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab
+epileptic...."
+
+"Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?" protested Benham.
+
+The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter
+experience. Most of it was better forgotten. It didn't convince. It had
+never worked things out. In this matter just as in every other matter
+that really signified things had still to be worked out. Nothing had
+been worked out hitherto. The wisdom of the ages was a Cant. People had
+been too busy quarrelling, fighting and running away. There wasn't
+any digested experience of the ages at all. Only the mis-remembered
+hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man.
+
+"Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or
+isn't it?" Prothero demanded. "There's a simple question enough, and is
+there anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages to tell
+me yes or no? Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and vigorous as a
+mated man? Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being? Can she
+be? I don't believe so. Then why in thunder do we let her be? Here am I
+at a centre of learning and wisdom and I don't believe so; and there is
+nothing in all our colleges, libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here,
+to settle that plain question for me, plainly and finally. My life is a
+grubby torment of cravings because it isn't settled. If sexual activity
+IS a part of the balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set
+about making it accessible and harmless and have done with it. Swedish
+exercises. That sort of thing. If it isn't, if it can be reduced and
+done without, then let us set about teaching people HOW to control
+themselves and reduce and get rid of this vehement passion. But all this
+muffled mystery, this pompous sneak's way we take with it!"
+
+"But, Billy! How can one settle these things? It's a matter of
+idiosyncrasy. What is true for one man isn't true for another. There's
+infinite difference of temperaments!"
+
+"Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral code
+for each sort? Why am I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for
+Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like a glove? It isn't
+convenient for me. It fits me like a hair-shirt. Of course there
+are temperaments, but why can't we formulate them and exercise the
+elementary charity of recognizing that one man's health in these matters
+is another man's death? Some want love and gratification and some don't.
+There are people who want children and people who don't want to be
+bothered by children but who are full of vivid desires. There are
+people whose only happiness is chastity, and women who would rather
+be courtesans than mothers. Some of us would concentrate upon a
+single passion or a single idea; others overflow with a
+miscellaneous--tenderness. Yes,--and you smile! Why spit upon and insult
+a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin at it? Why try every one
+by the standards that suit oneself? We're savages, Benham, shamefaced
+savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting.
+
+"I was angry about sex by seventeen," he went on. "Every year I live I
+grow angrier."
+
+His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
+
+"Think," he said, "of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex
+that is going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these
+thousands full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it
+together; we work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and
+casual stories, patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders,
+disease, trouble, escapes; and the next generation will start, and the
+next generation after that will start with nothing but your wisdom of
+the ages, which isn't wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos
+and mystery and the secretive cunning of the savage....
+
+"What I really want to do is my work," said Prothero, going off quite
+unexpectedly again. "That is why all this business, this incessant
+craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry...."
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+"There I'm with you," cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent
+of Prothero's prepossessions. "What we want to do is our work."
+
+He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting
+the word again.
+
+"It's this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--living
+the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of
+this business. If it was only submission.... YOU think it is only
+submission--giving way.... It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all
+right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't
+know all the time that there was something else to live for,
+something far more important. And different. Absolutely different
+and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these
+considerations. It won't fit in.... I don't know what this other thing
+is; it's what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS, in
+all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands control, it demands continence,
+it insists upon disregard."
+
+But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to
+Prothero that day.
+
+"Mankind," said Benham, "is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates
+us. It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent
+necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as
+being married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love
+story...."
+
+"Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied," said Prothero,
+sticking stoutly to his own view.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester
+after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and
+recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the
+imagination of Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero's
+troubles as soar over them. It is the last triumph of the human
+understanding to sympathize with desires we do not share, and to Benham
+who now believed himself to be loved beyond the chances of life, who
+was satisfied and tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible
+that Prothero's demands should seem anything more than the grotesque and
+squalid squealings of the beast that has to be overridden and rejected
+altogether. It is a freakish fact of our composition that these most
+intense feelings in life are just those that are most rapidly and
+completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years, but the magic
+of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives and
+vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was still not
+a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale,
+and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its
+sty....
+
+What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at last he
+could sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the project
+that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.
+
+He had discovered a new reason for travelling. The last country we can
+see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country. It is as hard to see
+one's own country as it is to see the back of one's head. It is too
+much behind us, too much ourselves. But Russia is like England with
+everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked
+about St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage
+untamed London on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal
+cities, like no other capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings
+mingled in their effects. Like London it looked over the heads of
+its own people to a limitless polyglot empire. And Russia was an
+aristocratic land, with a middle-class that had no pride in itself as a
+class; it had a British toughness and incompetence, a British disregard
+of logic and meticulous care. Russia, like England, was outside Catholic
+Christendom, it had a state church and the opposition to that church was
+not secularism but dissent. One could draw a score of such contrasted
+parallels. And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid
+bare the elemental facts of a great social organization. It was having
+its South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a
+certain defeat instead of a dubious victory....
+
+"There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in
+England," said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.
+
+Benham went on with his discourse about Russia....
+
+"At the college of Troitzka," said Prothero, "which I understand is a
+kind of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me
+that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the
+arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are
+conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality."
+
+Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.
+
+He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation.
+He led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try
+to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty
+of every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much. And so he
+was going, and if Prothero cared to come too--
+
+"Yes," said Prothero, "I should like to go to Russia."
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was never
+able to lift Prothero away from his obsession. It was the substance of
+their talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting destroyers and
+winking beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the smoothly undulating
+darkness of the North Sea; it rose upon them again as they sat over
+the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in the express for Berlin.
+Prothero filled the Sieges Allee with his complaints against nature
+and society, and distracted Benham in his contemplation of Polish
+agriculture from the windows of the train with turgid sexual liberalism.
+So that Benham, during this period until Prothero left him and until
+the tragic enormous spectacle of Russia in revolution took complete
+possession of him, was as it were thinking upon two floors. Upon the one
+he was thinking of the vast problems of a society of a hundred million
+people staggering on the verge of anarchy, and upon the other he was
+perplexed by the feverish inattention of Prothero to the tremendous
+things that were going on all about them. It was only presently when the
+serenity of his own private life began to be ruffled by disillusionment,
+that he began to realize the intimate connexion of these two systems of
+thought. Yet Prothero put it to him plainly enough.
+
+"Inattentive," said Prothero, "of course I am inattentive. What is
+really the matter with all this--this social mess people are in here, is
+that nearly everybody is inattentive. These Big Things of yours, nobody
+is thinking of them really. Everybody is thinking about the Near Things
+that concern himself."
+
+"The bombs they threw yesterday? The Cossacks and the whips?"
+
+"Nudges. Gestures of inattention. If everybody was thinking of the Res
+Publica would there be any need for bombs?"
+
+He pursued his advantage. "It's all nonsense to suppose people think of
+politics because they are in 'em. As well suppose that the passengers on
+a liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war. Before men can
+think of to-morrow, they must think of to-day. Before they can think
+of others, they must be sure about themselves. First of all, food; the
+private, the personal economic worry. Am I safe for food? Then sex, and
+until one is tranquil and not ashamed, not irritated and dissatisfied,
+how can one care for other people, or for next year or the Order of the
+World? How can one, Benham?"
+
+He seized the illustration at hand. "Here we are in Warsaw--not a month
+after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging. Windows have still to be
+mended, smashed doors restored. There's blood-stains still on some
+of the houses. There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and in the
+Ochrana prison. This morning there were executions. Is it anything more
+than an eddy in the real life of the place? Watch the customers in the
+shops, the crowd in the streets, the men in the cafes who stare at the
+passing women. They are all swallowed up again in their own business.
+They just looked up as the Cossacks galloped past; they just shifted a
+bit when the bullets spat...."
+
+And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing
+adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide of
+the private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him back to
+Cambridge--changed.
+
+Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
+disregard Prothero. He was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble
+of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the hurrying
+darknesses of an approaching storm. In those days it looked as though it
+must be an overwhelming storm. He was drinking in the wide and massive
+Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the entangling streets, the
+houses with their strange lettering in black and gold, the innumerable
+barbaric churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the sombre red fortress
+of the Kremlin, with its bulbous churches clustering up into the sky,
+the crosses, the innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil,
+carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of permissible caricature,
+and in this setting the obscure drama of clustering, staring,
+sash-wearing peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand
+varieties of uniform, a running and galloping to and fro of messengers,
+a flutter of little papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and
+portentous, a gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on
+to a perpetual clash and clamour of bells. Benham had brought letters of
+introduction to a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed. They
+were "away," the porters said, and they continued to be "away,"--it was
+the formula, he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few showed
+themselves extraordinarily anxious to inform him about things, to
+explain themselves and things about them exhaustively. One young student
+took him to various meetings and showed him in great detail the scene of
+the recent murder of the Grand Duke Sergius. The buildings opposite the
+old French cannons were still under repair. "The assassin stood just
+here. The bomb fell there, look! right down there towards the gate; that
+was where they found his arm. He was torn to fragments. He was scraped
+up. He was mixed with the horses...."
+
+Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter of
+days or at the utmost weeks. And whatever question Benham chose to
+ask these talkers were prepared to answer. Except one. "And after the
+revolution," he asked, "what then?..." Then they waved their hands, and
+failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.
+
+He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous drift
+towards a conflict. He was trying to piece together a process, if it
+was one and the same process, which involved riots in Lodz, fighting at
+Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal battlings in Manchuria,
+the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in the
+Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was trying to rationalize
+it all in his mind, to comprehend its direction. He was struggling
+strenuously with the obscurities of the language in which these things
+were being discussed about him, a most difficult language demanding new
+sets of visual images because of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder
+that for a time he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some
+entirely disconnected affair.
+
+They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre Square.
+Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-looking men
+with peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's friends and
+guides to take him out and show him this and that. At first Prothero
+always accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then he began to make
+excuses. He would stay behind in the hotel. Then when Benham returned
+Prothero would have disappeared. When the porter was questioned about
+Prothero his nescience was profound.
+
+One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who
+wanted to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was
+alarmed.
+
+"Moscow is a late place," said Benham's student friend. "You need not
+be anxious until after four or five in the morning. It will be quite
+time--QUITE time to be anxious to-morrow. He may be--close at hand."
+
+When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him
+sleepy and irritable.
+
+"I don't trouble if YOU are late," said Prothero, sitting up in his bed
+with a red resentful face and crumpled hair. "I wasn't born yesterday."
+
+"I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow."
+
+"I don't want to leave Moscow."
+
+"But Odessa--Odessa is the centre of interest just now."
+
+"I want to stay in Moscow."
+
+Benham looked baffled.
+
+Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon them.
+"I don't want to leave Moscow," he said, "and I'm not going to do so."
+
+"But haven't we done--"
+
+Prothero interrupted. "You may. But I haven't. We're not after the
+same things. Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest me. I've
+found--different things."
+
+His expression was extraordinarily defiant.
+
+"I want," he went on, "to put our affairs on a different footing. Now
+you've opened the matter we may as well go into it. You were good enough
+to bring me here.... There was a sort of understanding we were working
+together.... We aren't.... The long and short of it is, Benham, I want
+to pay you for my journey here and go on my own--independently."
+
+His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly
+incredible in him.
+
+Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters
+jerked back into Benham's memory. It popped back so suddenly that for an
+instant he wanted to laugh. He turned towards the window, picked his
+way among Prothero's carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment
+staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing
+fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS. Then he
+turned.
+
+"Billy," he said, "didn't I see you the other evening driving towards
+the Hermitage?"
+
+"Yes," said Prothero, and added, "that's it."
+
+"You were with a lady."
+
+"And she IS a lady," said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face
+twitched as though he was going to weep.
+
+"She's a Russian?"
+
+"She had an English mother. Oh, you needn't stand there and look so
+damned ironical! She's--she's a woman. She's a thing of kindness...."
+
+He was too full to go on.
+
+"Billy, old boy," said Benham, distressed, "I don't want to be
+ironical--"
+
+Prothero had got his voice again.
+
+"You'd better know," he said, "you'd better know. She's one of those
+women who live in this hotel."
+
+"Live in this hotel!"
+
+"On the fourth floor. Didn't you know? It's the way in most of these big
+Russian hotels. They come down and sit about after lunch and dinner. A
+woman with a yellow ticket. Oh! I don't care. I don't care a rap. She's
+been kind to me; she's--she's dear to me. How are you to understand? I
+shall stop in Moscow. I shall take her to England. I can't live without
+her, Benham. And then-- And then you come worrying me to come to your
+damned Odessa!"
+
+And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face
+as though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an
+apoplectic moment burst noisily into tears. They ran between his
+fingers. "Get out of my room," he shouted, suffocatingly. "What business
+have you to come prying on me?"
+
+Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared
+round-eyed at his friend. His hands were in his pockets. For a time he
+said nothing.
+
+"Billy," he began at last, and stopped again. "Billy, in this country
+somehow one wants to talk like a Russian. Billy, my dear--I'm not your
+father, I'm not your judge. I'm--unreasonably fond of you. It's not my
+business to settle what is right or wrong for you. If you want to stay
+in Moscow, stay in Moscow. Stay here, and stay as my guest...."
+
+He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.
+
+"I didn't know," said Prothero brokenly; "I didn't know it was possible
+to get so fond of a person...."
+
+Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
+abominable in his life before.
+
+"I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I'll make things all right here
+before I go...."
+
+He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound thought to
+his own room....
+
+Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to
+explain what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about the
+room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.
+
+In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to have
+shrunken to something sleek and small.
+
+"I wish," he said, "you could stay for a later train and have lunch and
+meet her. She's not the ordinary thing. She's--different."
+
+Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. "Billy," he said, "no woman IS the
+ordinary thing. They are all--different...."
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as
+disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any
+matter to be. While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and travelled
+hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in the endless
+tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero
+was lost to all those large issues in the development of his personal
+situation. He contributed nothing to Benham's thought except attempts at
+discouragement. He reiterated his declaration that all the vast
+stress and change of Russian national life was going on because it was
+universally disregarded. "I tell you, as I told you before, that nobody
+is attending. You think because all Moscow, all Russia, is in the
+picture, that everybody is concerned. Nobody is concerned. Nobody cares
+what is happening. Even the men who write in newspapers and talk at
+meetings about it don't care. They are thinking of their dinners, of
+their clothes, of their money, of their wives. They hurry home...."
+
+That was his excuse.
+
+Manifestly it was an excuse.
+
+His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy and
+divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible. To
+Benham in those days everything was very simple in this business of
+love. The aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all. He had to love
+Amanda. He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in
+love, he felt, than they had ever been before. They were now writing
+love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation that was almost
+voluptuous. She found in the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to
+him and to the natural fate of women, a delightful exercise for her very
+considerable powers of expression. Life pointed now wonderfully to the
+great time ahead when there would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and
+meanwhile the Cheetah loped about the wild world upon a mighty quest. In
+such terms she put it. Such foolishness written in her invincibly square
+and youthful hand went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up
+against his return in the porter's office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or
+pursued him down through the jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or
+waited for him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his journeyings
+wastefully or in several instances went altogether astray. Perhaps they
+supplied self-educating young strikers in the postal service with useful
+exercises in the deciphering of manuscript English. He wrote back five
+hundred different ways of saying that he loved her extravagantly....
+
+It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and
+solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world;
+Heroic Love to its highest note--and then you go about your business. It
+seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin high and diffuse
+a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate multitudes who stewed in
+affliction and hate because they had failed as yet to find this simple,
+culminating elucidation. And Prothero--Prothero, too, was now achieving
+the same grand elementariness, out of his lusts and protests and general
+physical squalor he had flowered into love. For a time it is true it
+made rather an ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere
+goose-stepping for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay
+exaltation. Benham had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this
+Anglo-Russian, who was a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had
+seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him,
+and his impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with
+dusky hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her,
+a quiet alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda. And
+if she liked old Prothero-- And, indeed, she must like old Prothero or
+could she possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?
+
+They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero's soul
+would wake up and face the world again. What did it matter what she had
+been?
+
+Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained anxiety
+and the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering towards
+revolution, Benham went with his own love like a lamp within him
+and this affair of Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was quite
+prepared for the most sympathetic and liberal behaviour when he came
+back to Moscow to make the lady's acquaintance. He intended to help
+Prothero to marry and take her back to Cambridge, and to assist by every
+possible means in destroying and forgetting the official yellow ticket
+that defined her status in Moscow. But he reckoned without either
+Prothero or the young lady in this expectation.
+
+It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations
+that there were obscure obstacles to this manifest course. Prothero
+hesitated; the lady expressed doubts.
+
+On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished. It was
+chiefly a similarity of complexion. She had a more delicate face than
+Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none of
+Amanda's glow, and she spoke her mother's language with a pretty halting
+limp that was very different from Amanda's clear decisions.
+
+She put her case compactly.
+
+"I would not DO in Cambridge," she said with an infinitesimal glance at
+Prothero.
+
+"Mr. Benham," she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman
+of affairs, "now do you see me in Cambridge? Now do you see me? Kept
+outside the walls? In a little DATCHA? With no occupation? Just to amuse
+him."
+
+And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved
+still completer lucidity.
+
+"I would come if I thought he wanted me to come," she said. "But you see
+if I came he would not want me to come. Because then he would have me
+and so he wouldn't want me. He would just have the trouble. And I am not
+sure if I should be happy in Cambridge. I am not sure I should be happy
+enough to make him happy. It is a very learned and intelligent and
+charming society, of course; but here, THINGS HAPPEN. At Cambridge
+nothing happens--there is only education. There is no revolution in
+Cambridge; there are not even sinful people to be sorry for.... And
+he says himself that Cambridge people are particular. He says they are
+liberal but very, very particular, and perhaps I could not always act my
+part well. Sometimes I am not always well behaved. When there is music I
+behave badly sometimes, or when I am bored. He says the Cambridge people
+are so liberal that they do not mind what you are, but he says they are
+so particular that they mind dreadfully how you are what you are.... So
+that it comes to exactly the same thing...."
+
+"Anna Alexievna," said Benham suddenly, "are you in love with Prothero?"
+
+Her manner became conscientiously scientific.
+
+"He is very kind and very generous--too generous. He keeps sending for
+more money--hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him."
+
+"Were you EVER in love?"
+
+"Of course. But it's all gone long ago. It was like being hungry. Only
+very fine hungry. Exquisite hungry.... And then being disgusted...."
+
+"He is in love with you."
+
+"What is love?" said Anna. "He is grateful. He is by nature grateful."
+She smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who looks down on
+her bambino.
+
+"And you love nothing?"
+
+"I love Russia--and being alone, being completely alone. When I am dead
+perhaps I shall be alone. Not even my own body will touch me then."
+
+Then she added, "But I shall be sorry when he goes."
+
+Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone. "Your Anna," he said, "is
+rather wonderful. At first, I tell you now frankly I did not like her
+very much, I thought she looked 'used,' she drank vodka at lunch, she
+was gay, uneasily; she seemed a sham thing. All that was prejudice. She
+thinks; she's generous, she's fine."
+
+"She's tragic," said Prothero as though it was the same thing.
+
+He spoke as though he noted an objection. His next remark confirmed this
+impression. "That's why I can't take her back to Cambridge," he said.
+
+"You see, Benham," he went on, "she's human. She's not really feminine.
+I mean, she's--unsexed. She isn't fitted to be a wife or a mother any
+more. We've talked about the possible life in England, very plainly.
+I've explained what a household in Cambridge would mean.... It doesn't
+attract her.... In a way she's been let out from womanhood, forced out
+of womanhood, and I see now that when women are let out from womanhood
+there's no putting them back. I could give a lecture on Anna. I see
+now that if women are going to be wives and mothers and homekeepers and
+ladies, they must be got ready for it from the beginning, sheltered,
+never really let out into the wild chances of life. She has been.
+Bitterly. She's REALLY emancipated. And it's let her out into a sort of
+nothingness. She's no longer a woman, and she isn't a man. She ought
+to be able to go on her own--like a man. But I can't take her back to
+Cambridge. Even for her sake."
+
+His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.
+
+"You won't be happy in Cambridge--alone," said Benham.
+
+"Oh, damnably not! But what can I do? I had at first some idea of coming
+to Moscow for good--teaching."
+
+He paused. "Impossible. I'm worth nothing here. I couldn't have kept
+her."
+
+"Then what are you going to do, Billy?"
+
+"I don't KNOW what I'm going to do, I tell you. I live for the moment.
+To-morrow we are going out into the country."
+
+"I don't understand," said Benham with a gesture of resignation. "It
+seems to me that if a man and woman love each other--well, they insist
+upon each other. What is to happen to her if you leave her in Moscow?"
+
+"Damnation! Is there any need to ask that?"
+
+"Take her to Cambridge, man. And if Cambridge objects, teach Cambridge
+better manners."
+
+Prothero's face was suddenly transfigured with rage.
+
+"I tell you she won't come!" he said.
+
+"Billy!" said Benham, "you should make her!"
+
+"I can't."
+
+"If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything--"
+
+"But I don't love her like that," said Prothero, shrill with anger. "I
+tell you I don't love her like that."
+
+Then he lunged into further deeps. "It's the other men," he said, "it's
+the things that have been. Don't you understand? Can't you understand?
+The memories--she must have memories--they come between us. It's
+something deeper than reason. It's in one's spine and under one's nails.
+One could do anything, I perceive, for one's very own woman...."
+
+"MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.
+
+"I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How could any man make her
+his very own woman now? You--you don't seem to understand--ANYTHING.
+She's nobody's woman--for ever. That--that might-have-been has gone for
+ever.... It's nerves--a passion of the nerves. There's a cruelty in life
+and-- She's KIND to me. She's so kind to me...."
+
+And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken
+fragments in letters. When he looked for Anna Alexievna in December--he
+never learnt her surname--he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar
+soon after Prothero's departure and he could not find whither she had
+gone. He never found her again. Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.
+
+Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion. But
+Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock
+to Benham's ideas. It was clear he went off almost callously; it would
+seem there was very little crying. Towards the end it was evident that
+the two had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very end of all. It
+was almost as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go.
+Then came regret, a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with
+every mile of distance.
+
+In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero. He had some hours
+there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy
+with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious
+secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant
+resemblance to Anna....
+
+In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back.
+"But now I had the damned frontier," he wrote, "between us."
+
+It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the
+"damned frontier" tip the balance against him.
+
+Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it
+seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured. "I can't stand this
+business," he wrote. "It has things in it, possibilities of emotional
+disturbance--you can have no idea! In the train--luckily I was alone in
+the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it,
+I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar! A beastly German came and
+stood in the corridor to stare. I had to get out of the train. It is
+disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this....
+
+"Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you
+about my dismal feelings...."
+
+After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but
+to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable
+regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of
+his friend. Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.
+
+"There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris," he wrote. "A levity.
+I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet undescribed
+radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of those
+tear-compelling German emanations....
+
+"And, Benham, I have found a friend.
+
+"A woman. Of course you will laugh, you will sneer. You do not
+understand these things.... Yet they are so simple. It was the strangest
+accident brought us together. There was something that drew us together.
+A sort of instinct. Near the Boulevard Poissoniere...."
+
+"Good heavens!" said Benham. "A sort of instinct!"
+
+"I told her all about Anna!"
+
+"Good Lord!" cried Benham.
+
+"She understood. Perfectly. None of your so-called 'respectable' women
+could have understood.... At first I intended merely to talk to her...."
+
+Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.
+
+"Little Anna Alexievna!" he said, "you were too clean for him."
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel
+meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief,
+to the grey mildness of Trinity. He saw him, capped and gowned,
+and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming
+friendships.
+
+The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts
+and restrained celibates at the high tables. They ate on in their mature
+wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled. Presently they would
+withdraw processionally to the combination room....
+
+There would be much to talk about over the wine.
+
+Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow....
+
+He laughed abruptly.
+
+And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space
+of years. There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost
+in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office. Perhaps
+to this day they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in
+Kishinev or Ekaterinoslav....
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+In November, after an adventure in the trader's quarter of Kieff which
+had brought him within an inch of death, and because an emotional wave
+had swept across him and across his correspondence with Amanda, Benham
+went back suddenly to England and her. He wanted very greatly to see her
+and also he wanted to make certain arrangements about his property. He
+returned by way of Hungary, and sent telegrams like shouts of excitement
+whenever the train stopped for a sufficient time. "Old Leopard, I am
+coming, I am coming," he telegraphed, announcing his coming for the
+fourth time. It was to be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the
+mutual refreshment of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to
+Russia again.
+
+Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the utmost
+dignity of expectant maternity. Like many other people he had been a
+little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a common human
+experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a rare and
+sacramental function. Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey,
+dove-like tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had given way to
+a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, her brisk little neck that had
+always reminded him of the stalk of a flower was now softened and
+rounded; her eyes were tender, and she moved about the place in the
+manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the
+scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and
+a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic,
+half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled
+immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside
+he found--it had been put there for him by Amanda--among much
+other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all
+philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.
+
+Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the impending
+fact. An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in
+the depths of London society, but to make up for his absence Mrs. Morris
+had taken a little cottage down by the river and the Wilder girls were
+with her, both afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it seemed,
+and more particularly Betty, prepared to be keenly critical of Benham's
+attitude.
+
+He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had
+returned in a rather different vein of exaltation.
+
+In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments an
+effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed. It was as if she
+put aside for him something official, something sincerely maintained,
+necessary, but at times a little irksome. It was as if she was glad to
+take him into her confidence and unbend. Within the pre-natal Amanda an
+impish Amanda still lingered.
+
+There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must never
+know....
+
+But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most unpontifical
+moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him
+home across Europe. At times she was extraordinarily jolly. They had two
+or three happy walks about the Chexington woods; that year the golden
+weather of October had flowed over into November, and except for a
+carpet of green and gold under the horse-chestnuts most of the leaves
+were still on the trees. Gleams of her old wanton humour shone on him.
+And then would come something else, something like a shadow across the
+world, something he had quite forgotten since his idea of heroic love
+had flooded him, something that reminded him of those long explanations
+with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that had never been explained, and of the
+curate in the doorway of the cottage and his unaccountable tears.
+
+On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little surprised
+to find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into the garden, with
+an accustomed familiarity. Sir Philip perceived him with a start that
+was instantly controlled, and greeted him with unnatural ease.
+
+Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket in
+the neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending the
+summer, the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from scholars
+and literary men. A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought to have been
+aviating or travelling.
+
+Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that there
+was a flavour of established association in their manner. But then Sir
+Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne. She called him "Pip,"
+and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-court to him, "Pip!" And
+then he called her "Amanda." When the Wilder girls came up to join the
+tennis he was just as brotherly....
+
+The next day he came to lunch.
+
+During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been before
+of the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes. They
+watched him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that seemed at
+once pained and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind
+of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably
+suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon
+Sir Philip would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up
+and go away in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he
+could be spoken to he contrived to speak to Benham.
+
+They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took advantage
+of a pause to commit his little indiscretion.
+
+"Mrs. Benham," he said, "looks amazingly well--extraordinarily well,
+don't you think?"
+
+"Yes," said Benham, startled. "Yes. She certainly keeps very well."
+
+"She misses you terribly," said Sir Philip; "it is a time when a woman
+misses her husband. But, of course, she does not want to hamper your
+work...."
+
+Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest in
+these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no better
+expression for this than a grunt.
+
+"You don't mind," said the young man with a slight catch in the breath
+that might have been apprehensive, "that I sometimes bring her books and
+flowers and things? Do what little I can to keep life interesting down
+here? It's not very congenial.... She's so wonderful--I think she is the
+most wonderful woman in the world."
+
+Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was
+really a primitive barbarian in these matters.
+
+"I've no doubt," he said, "that my wife has every reason to be grateful
+for your attentions."
+
+In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir Philip
+was engendering something still more personal. If so, he might
+be constrained to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of
+chrysanthemums over Sir Philip's head, or kick him in an improving
+manner. He had a ridiculous belief that Sir Philip would probably take
+anything of the sort very touchingly. He scrambled in his mind for some
+remark that would avert this possibility.
+
+"Have you ever been in Russia?" he asked hastily. "It is the most
+wonderful country in Europe. I had an odd adventure near Kiev. During a
+pogrom."
+
+And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description....
+
+But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were presently
+thrown out by Lady Marayne. They were so much more in the air....
+
+
+
+18
+
+
+Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had foreseen.
+
+"Easton has gone away," he remarked three days later to Amanda.
+
+"I told him to go. He is a bore with you about. But otherwise he is
+rather a comfort, Cheetah." She meditated upon Sir Philip. "And he's an
+HONOURABLE man," she said. "He's safe...."
+
+
+
+19
+
+
+After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in
+earnest. The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic love for
+the modern aristocrat ended abruptly. Instead there came the first draft
+for a study of jealousy. The note was written in pencil on Chexington
+notepaper and manifestly that had been supported on the ribbed cover
+of a book. There was a little computation in the corner, converting
+forty-five degrees Reaumur into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White
+guess it had been written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it had been
+written in a rather amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's
+journey to the gathering revolt in Moscow....
+
+"I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual
+jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible,
+something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort
+to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so
+easily settled with....
+
+"One likes to know.... Possibly one wants to know too much.... In phases
+of fatigue, and particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one
+is leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an irrational
+torment....
+
+"And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of this
+base motive. I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how strongly
+jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with a
+man....
+
+"There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human being
+being one's ownest own--utterly one's own....
+
+"There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives....
+
+"One does....
+
+"There is something dishonouring in distrust--to both the distrusted and
+the one who distrusts...."
+
+After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.
+
+
+
+20
+
+
+Benham did not see Amanda again until after the birth of their child.
+He spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the fitful
+fighting and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and taking
+care of a lost and helpless English family whose father had gone astray
+temporarily on the way home from Baku. Then he went southward to Rostov
+and thence to Astrakhan. Here he really began his travels. He determined
+to get to India by way of Herat and for the first time in his life
+rode out into an altogether lawless wilderness. He went on obstinately
+because he found himself disposed to funk the journey, and because
+discouragements were put in his way. He was soon quite cut off from all
+the ways of living he had known. He learnt what it is to be flea-bitten,
+saddle-sore, hungry and, above all, thirsty. He was haunted by a dread
+of fever, and so contrived strange torments for himself with overdoses
+of quinine. He ceased to be traceable from Chexington in March, and he
+reappeared in the form of a telegram from Karachi demanding news in May.
+He learnt he was the father of a man-child and that all was well with
+Amanda.
+
+He had not expected to be so long away from any communication with the
+outer world, and something in the nature of a stricken conscience took
+him back to England. He found a second William Porphyry in the world,
+dominating Chexington, and Amanda tenderly triumphant and passionate,
+the Madonna enthroned. For William Porphyry he could feel no emotion.
+William Porphyry was very red and ugly and protesting, feeble and
+aggressive, a matter for a skilled nurse. To see him was to ignore him
+and dispel a dream. It was to Amanda Benham turned again.
+
+For some days he was content to adore his Madonna and listen to the
+familiar flatteries of her love. He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda
+said, and wiser, so that she was afraid of him....
+
+And then he became aware that she was requiring him to stay at her side.
+"We have both had our adventures," she said, which struck him as an odd
+phrase.
+
+It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those
+conceptions of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so
+clearly understood between them had vanished from her mind. She had
+absolutely forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had seemed
+to him the crowning instant, the real marriage of their lives. It
+had gone, it had left no recoverable trace in her. And upon his
+interpretations of that he had loved her passionately for a year. She
+was back at exactly the ideas and intentions that ruled her during their
+first settlement in London. She wanted a joint life in the social world
+of London, she demanded his presence, his attention, the daily practical
+evidences of love. It was all very well for him to be away when the
+child was coming, but now everything was different. Now he must stay by
+her.
+
+This time he argued no case. These issues he had settled for ever. Even
+an indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation that began
+with appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him. Behind these things
+now was India. The huge problems of India had laid an unshakeable hold
+upon his imagination. He had seen Russia, and he wanted to balance that
+picture by a vision of the east....
+
+He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington. The young man
+displayed no further disposition to be confidentially sentimental. But
+he seemed to have something on his mind. And Amanda said not a word
+about him. He was a young man above suspicion, Benham felt....
+
+And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these
+two larger carnivores began to change. Except for the repetition of
+accustomed endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense of
+the word. They dealt chiefly with the "Cub," and even there Benham felt
+presently that the enthusiasm diminished. A new amazing quality for
+Amanda appeared--triteness. The very writing of her letters changed
+as though it had suddenly lost backbone. Her habitual liveliness
+of phrasing lost its point. Had she lost her animation? Was she ill
+unknowingly? Where had the light gone? It was as if her attention was
+distracted.... As if every day when she wrote her mind was busy about
+something else.
+
+Abruptly at last he understood. A fact that had never been stated,
+never formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to
+convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question
+perceived to be THERE....
+
+He left a record of that moment of realization.
+
+"Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had
+never seen Amanda before. Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with that
+same dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a pitiless, a
+scientific distinctness that has neither light nor shadow....
+
+"Of course," I said, and then presently I got up very softly....
+
+"I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin. I wanted
+to feel the largeness of the sky. I went out upon the deck. We were off
+the coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment, there comes back
+to me also the faint flavour of spice in the air, the low line of the
+coast, the cool flooding abundance of the Indian moonlight, the swish
+of the black water against the side of the ship. And a perception of
+infinite loss, as if the limitless heavens above this earth and below
+to the very uttermost star were just one boundless cavity from which
+delight had fled....
+
+"Of course I had lost her. I knew it with absolute certainty. I knew it
+from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her needs. I knew it
+from every line she had written me in the last three months. I knew it
+intuitively. She had been unfaithful. She must have been unfaithful.
+
+"What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?"
+
+
+
+21
+
+
+"Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters. Let me
+be at least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I may
+have been led into by force of my passions. Always I have despised
+jealousy....
+
+"Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the aristocratic
+life to be achieved. They come in a certain order, and in that order the
+spirit of man is armed against them less and less efficiently. Of fear
+and my struggle against fear I have told already. I am fearful. I am a
+physical coward until I can bring shame and anger to my assistance,
+but in overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole body of human
+tradition. Every one, the basest creatures, every Hottentot, every
+stunted creature that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the
+instinctive constitution of man is at fault here and that fear is
+shameful and must be subdued. The race is on one's side. And so there is
+a vast traditional support for a man against the Second Limitation, the
+limitation of physical indulgence. It is not so universal as the first,
+there is a grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness, but common
+pride is against it. And in this matter my temperament has been my help:
+I am fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil
+from excess. It is no great virtue; it happens so; it is something in
+the nerves of my skin. I cannot endure myself unshaven or in any way
+unclean; I am tormented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories,
+and after I had once loved Amanda I could not--unless some irrational
+impulse to get equal with her had caught me--have broken my faith to
+her, whatever breach there was in her faith to me....
+
+"I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more easily
+clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that distinctive
+virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment and anger.
+
+"I despised a jealous man. There is a traditional discredit of jealousy,
+not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very strong. But
+the general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with the
+supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, that it is unreasonable
+suspicion. Given a cause then tradition speaks with an uncertain
+voice....
+
+"I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was
+impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable
+to imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as
+fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my
+image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that she
+was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently,
+gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a pool, that
+knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated up into my
+consciousness.
+
+"And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me! Outrageously. Abominably.
+
+"Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this
+question. My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right
+whatever to her love or loyalty. I must have that very clear....
+
+"This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except accidentally
+here and there, incompatible with the domestic life. It means going
+hither and thither in the universe of thought as much as in the universe
+of matter, it means adventure, it means movement and adventure that must
+needs be hopelessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it means
+self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit into the welfare of a
+family. In all ages, directly society had risen above the level of a
+barbaric tribal village, this need of a release from the family for
+certain necessary types of people has been recognized. It was
+met sometimes informally, sometimes formally, by the growth and
+establishment of special classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of
+pledged knights, of a great variety of non-family people, whose
+concern was the larger collective life that opens out beyond the
+simple necessities and duties and loyalties of the steading and of the
+craftsman's house. Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form
+of celibacy; but besides that there have been a hundred institutional
+variations of the common life to meet the need of the special man,
+the man who must go deep and the man who must go far. A vowed celibacy
+ceased to be a tolerable rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic
+idea entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristocracy means the
+abandonment of the racial future to a proletariat of base unleaderly
+men. That was plain to Plato. It was plain to Campanelea. It was plain
+to the Protestant reformers. But the world has never yet gone on to
+the next step beyond that recognition, to the recognition of feminine
+aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as untrammelled by domestic
+servitudes and family relationships as the men of their kind. That I see
+has always been my idea since in my undergraduate days I came under the
+spell of Plato. It was a matter of course that my first gift to Amanda
+should be his REPUBLIC. I loved Amanda transfigured in that dream....
+
+"There are no such women....
+
+"It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with myself.
+I had no sound reason for supposing that. I did suppose that. I did not
+perceive that not only was she younger than myself, but that while I
+had been going through a mill of steely education, kept close, severely
+exercised, polished by discussion, she had but the weak training of a
+not very good school, some scrappy reading, the vague discussions
+of village artists, and the draped and decorated novelties of the
+'advanced.' It all went to nothing on the impact of the world.... She
+showed herself the woman the world has always known, no miracle, and
+the alternative was for me to give myself to her in the ancient way, to
+serve her happiness, to control her and delight and companion her, or to
+let her go.
+
+"The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm and
+her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home. She demands
+the concentration of a man. Not to be able to command that is her
+failure. Not to give her that is to shame her. As I had shamed
+Amanda...."
+
+
+
+22
+
+
+"There are no such women." He had written this in and struck it out, and
+then at some later time written it in again. There it stayed now as his
+last persuasion, but it set White thinking and doubting. And, indeed,
+there was another sheet of pencilled broken stuff that seemed to glance
+at quite another type of womanhood.
+
+
+
+23
+
+
+"It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the remaking of
+the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as great as those
+from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes. These women must
+become aristocratic through their own innate impulse, they must be
+self-called to their lives, exactly as men must be; there is no making
+an aristocrat without a predisposition for rule and nobility. And they
+have to discover and struggle against just exactly the limitations that
+we have to struggle against. They have to conquer not only fear
+but indulgence, indulgence of a softer, more insidious quality, and
+jealousy--proprietorship....
+
+"It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand times
+in my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and desired a
+mate. A mate--not a possession. It is a need almost naively simple. If
+only one could have a woman who thought of one and with one! Though
+she were on the other side of the world and busied about a thousand
+things....
+
+"'WITH one,' I see it must be rather than 'OF one.' That 'of one' is
+just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again....
+
+"Man is a mating creature. It is not good to be alone. But mating means
+a mate....
+
+"We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying....
+
+"And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers. 'Dancing
+attendance'--as they used to say. We should meet upon our ways as the
+great carnivores do....
+
+"That at any rate was a sound idea. Though we only played with it.
+
+"But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible
+satisfaction now for me. What is the good of dreaming? Life and chance
+have played a trick upon my body and soul. I am mated, though I am
+mated to a phantom. I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton's Amanda, but
+Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams. Sense, and particularly the
+sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason in us. There can be no mate
+for me now unless she comes with Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and
+Amanda's quick movements and her clever hands...."
+
+
+
+24
+
+
+"Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?
+
+"There were things between us two as lovers,--love, things more
+beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind
+hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression,
+images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight
+in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off
+wonderful music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing
+softly, of floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and
+sudden as the knife of an assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears,
+tears that are happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations,
+gratitudes, sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft
+eyelid closed in sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard
+unexpectedly; sweet, dear magical things that I can find no words
+for....
+
+"If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that she
+was not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that has been
+between us more cheaply than I did? It does not change one jot of it for
+me. At the time she did not hold it cheaply. She forgets where I do not
+forget...."
+
+
+
+25
+
+
+Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.
+
+Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda and
+himself.
+
+He did not at once turn homeward. It was in Ceylon that he dropped his
+work and came home. At Colombo he found a heap of letters awaiting him,
+and there were two of these that had started at the same time. They had
+been posted in London on one eventful afternoon. Lady Marayne and Amanda
+had quarrelled violently. Two earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women,
+full of neat but belated repartee, separated to write their simultaneous
+letters. Each letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.
+Lady Marayne told her story ruthlessly. Amanda, on the other hand,
+generalized, and explained. Sir Philip's adoration of her was a
+love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure. Was there no trust nor
+courage in the world? She would defy all jealous scandal. She would not
+even banish him from her side. Surely the Cheetah could trust her. But
+the pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond Amanda's explaining. The
+little lady's dignity had been stricken. "I have been used as a cloak,"
+she wrote.
+
+Her phrases were vivid. She quoted the very words of Amanda, words she
+had overheard at Chexington in the twilight. They were no invention.
+They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover. It was as sure as if
+Benham had heard the sound of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen,
+as if she had crept by him, stooping and rustling softly. It brought
+back the living sense of her, excited, flushed, reckless; his
+wild-haired Amanda of infinite delight.... All day those words of hers
+pursued him. All night they flared across the black universe. He buried
+his face in the pillows and they whispered softly in his ear.
+
+He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.
+
+He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the
+stirring quiet of the stars.
+
+He sent no notice of his coming back. Nor did he come back with a
+definite plan. But he wanted to get at Amanda.
+
+
+
+26
+
+
+It was with Amanda he had to reckon. Towards Easton he felt scarcely any
+anger at all. Easton he felt only existed for him because Amanda willed
+to have it so.
+
+Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger. His
+devotion filled Benham with scorn. His determination to serve Amanda at
+any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights for her,
+his humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her moods and
+happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility. That rage
+against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist against a blackleg.
+Are all the women to fall to the men who will be their master-slaves and
+keepers? But it was not simply that Benham felt men must be freed from
+this incessant attendance; women too must free themselves from their
+almost instinctive demand for an attendant....
+
+His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings. Never
+in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and
+won and competed for and fought over. So that it was Amanda he wanted
+to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses
+only to fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and jealous fury.
+But the forces that were driving him home now were the forces below the
+level of reason and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and desire,
+profound aboriginal urgencies. He thought, indeed, very little as he
+lay in his berth or sulked on deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless
+invasion of exasperating images that ever and again would so wring him
+that his muscles would tighten and his hands clench or he would find
+himself restraining a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.
+
+Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole world.
+She filled the skies. She bent over him and mocked him. She became a
+mystery of passion and dark beauty. She was the sin of the world. One
+breathed her in the winds of the sea. She had taken to herself the
+greatness of elemental things....
+
+So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see that
+she was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather tired and
+very frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an evening-dress of
+unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of gold and colour about
+her wrists and neck.
+
+In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him
+homeward. He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has
+greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.
+
+For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to kill
+than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.
+
+
+
+27
+
+
+He took them by surprise. It had been his intention to take them by
+surprise. Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.
+
+He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near Charing
+Cross. In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in Lancaster
+Gate. The butler was deferentially amazed. Mrs. Benham was, he said, at
+a theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought some other people also.
+He did not know when she would be back. She might go on to supper. It
+was not the custom for the servants to wait up for her.
+
+Benham went into the study that reduplicated his former rooms in Finacue
+Street and sat down before the fire the butler lit for him. He sent the
+man to bed, and fell into profound meditation.
+
+It was nearly two o'clock when he heard the sound of her latchkey and
+went out at once upon the landing.
+
+The half-door stood open and Easton's car was outside. She stood in
+the middle of the hall and relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he was
+carrying.
+
+"Good-night," she said, "I am so tired."
+
+"My wonderful goddess," he said.
+
+She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, then started, stared, and
+wrenched herself out of his arms.
+
+Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon them,
+white-faced and inexpressive. Easton dropped back a pace. For a moment
+no one moved nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton shut the half-door
+and shut out the noises of the road.
+
+For some seconds Benham regarded them, and as he did so his spirit
+changed....
+
+Everything he had thought of saying and doing vanished out of his mind.
+
+He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended the staircase. When
+he was five or six steps above them, he spoke. "Just sit down here," he
+said, with a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself upon the stairs.
+"DO sit down," he said with a sudden testiness as they continued
+standing. "I know all about this affair. Do please sit down and let us
+talk.... Everybody's gone to bed long ago."
+
+"Cheetah!" she said. "Why have you come back like this?"
+
+Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet.
+
+"I wish you would sit down, Easton," he said in a voice of subdued
+savagery.
+
+"Why have you come back?" Sir Philip Easton found his voice to ask.
+
+"SIT down," Benham spat, and Easton obeyed unwillingly.
+
+"I came back," Benham went on, "to see to all this. Why else? I
+don't--now I see you--feel very fierce about it. But it has distressed
+me. You look changed, Amanda, and fagged. And your hair is untidy. It's
+as if something had happened to you and made you a stranger.... You two
+people are lovers. Very natural and simple, but I want to get out of it.
+Yes, I want to get out of it. That wasn't quite my idea, but now I see
+it is. It's queer, but on the whole I feel sorry for you. All of us,
+poor humans--. There's reason to be sorry for all of us. We're full
+of lusts and uneasiness and resentments that we haven't the will to
+control. What do you two people want me to do to you? Would you like a
+divorce, Amanda? It's the clean, straight thing, isn't it? Or would the
+scandal hurt you?"
+
+Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on Benham.
+
+"Give us a divorce," said Easton, looking to her to confirm him.
+
+Amanda shook her head.
+
+"I don't want a divorce," she said.
+
+"Then what do you want?" asked Benham with sudden asperity.
+
+"I don't want a divorce," she repeated. "Why do you, after a long
+silence, come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?"
+
+"It was the way it took me," said Benham, after a little interval.
+
+"You have left me for long months."
+
+"Yes. I was angry. And it was ridiculous to be angry. I thought I wanted
+to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is to help
+you out of this miserable mess--and then get away from you. You two
+would like to marry. You ought to be married."
+
+"I would die to make Amanda happy," said Easton.
+
+"Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make her happy. That you
+may find more of a strain. Less tragic and more tiresome. I, on the
+other hand, want neither to die nor live for her." Amanda moved sharply.
+"It's extraordinary what amazing vapours a lonely man may get into his
+head. If you don't want a divorce then I suppose things might go on as
+they are now."
+
+"I hate things as they are now," said Easton. "I hate this falsehood and
+deception."
+
+"You would hate the scandal just as much," said Amanda.
+
+"I would not care what the scandal was unless it hurt you."
+
+"It would be only a temporary inconvenience," said Benham. "Every one
+would sympathize with you.... The whole thing is so natural.... People
+would be glad to forget very soon. They did with my mother."
+
+"No," said Amanda, "it isn't so easy as that."
+
+She seemed to come to a decision.
+
+"Pip," she said. "I want to talk to--HIM--alone."
+
+Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity. "But why?"
+he asked.
+
+"I do," she said.
+
+"But this is a thing for US."
+
+"Pip, I want to talk to him alone. There is something--something I can't
+say before you...."
+
+Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet.
+
+"Shall I wait outside?"
+
+"No, Pip. Go home. Yes,--there are some things you must leave to me."
+
+She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the
+younger man. The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to be
+at any cost splendid. He felt--and it was a most unexpected and
+disconcerting feeling--that he was no longer confederated with Amanda;
+that prior, more fundamental and greater associations prevailed over his
+little new grip upon her mind and senses. He stared at husband and wife
+aghast in this realization. Then his resolute romanticism came to his
+help. "I would trust you--" he began. "If you tell me to go--"
+
+Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.
+
+She laid her hand upon his arm. "Go, my dear Pip," she said. "Go."
+
+He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham
+as though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen,
+somewhere, he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in a
+gap that otherwise he could not have supplied.
+
+Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly
+dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.
+
+"WELL?" said Benham.
+
+She held out her arms to him.
+
+"Why did you leave me, Cheetah? Why did you leave me?"
+
+
+
+28
+
+
+Benham affected to ignore those proffered arms. But they recalled in
+a swift rush the animal anger that had brought him back to England.
+To remind him of desire now was to revive an anger stronger than any
+desire. He spoke seeking to hurt her.
+
+"I am wondering now," he said, "why the devil I came back."
+
+"You had to come back to me."
+
+"I could have written just as well about these things."
+
+"CHEETAH," she said softly, and came towards him slowly, stooping
+forward and looking into his eyes, "you had to come back to see your old
+Leopard. Your wretched Leopard. Who has rolled in the dirt. And is still
+yours."
+
+"Do you want a divorce? How are we to fix things, Amanda?"
+
+"Cheetah, I will tell you how we will fix things."
+
+She dropped upon the step below him. She laid her hands with a
+deliberate softness upon him, she gave a toss so that her disordered
+hair was a little more disordered, and brought her soft chin down to
+touch his knees. Her eyes implored him.
+
+"Cheetah," she said. "You are going to forgive."
+
+He sat rigid, meeting her eyes.
+
+"Amanda," he said at last, "you would be astonished if I kicked you away
+from me and trampled over you to the door. That is what I want to do."
+
+"Do it," she said, and the grip of her hands tightened. "Cheetah, dear!
+I would love you to kill me."
+
+"I don't want to kill you."
+
+Her eyes dilated. "Beat me."
+
+"And I haven't the remotest intention of making love to you," he said,
+and pushed her soft face and hands away from him as if he would stand
+up.
+
+She caught hold of him again. "Stay with me," she said.
+
+He made no effort to shake off her grip. He looked at the dark cloud of
+her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of old delights
+made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as he spoke. "Dear
+Leopard," he said, "we humans are the most streaky of conceivable
+things. I thought I hated you. I do. I hate you like poison. And also I
+do not hate you at all."
+
+Then abruptly he was standing over her.
+
+She rose to her knees.
+
+"Stay here, old Cheetah!" she said. "This is your house. I am your
+wife."
+
+He went towards the unfastened front door.
+
+"Cheetah!" she cried with a note of despair.
+
+He halted at the door.
+
+"Amanda, I will come to-morrow. I will come in the morning, in the sober
+London daylight, and then we will settle things."
+
+He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled. He spoke as one who
+remarks upon a quite unexpected fact....
+
+"Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human being that I wanted so
+little to kill."
+
+
+
+29
+
+
+White found a fragment that might have been written within a week of
+those last encounters of Benham and Amanda.
+
+"The thing that astonished me most in Amanda was the change in her
+mental quality.
+
+"With me in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she had
+deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself.
+Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it
+was gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing
+of poses and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei.
+Beneath that surface I could not discover anything individual at all.
+Fear and a grasping quality, such as God gave us all when he gave us
+hands; but the individual I knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard
+was gone. Whither, I cannot imagine. An amazing disappearance. Clean out
+of space and time like a soul lost for ever.
+
+"When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene, she
+acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in reality....
+
+"I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this way,
+by cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she despised....
+There can be no inequality in love. Give and take must balance. One must
+be one's natural self or the whole business is an indecent trick, a vile
+use of life! To use inferiors in love one must needs talk down to
+them, interpret oneself in their insufficient phrases, pretend,
+sentimentalize. And it is clear that unless oneself is to be lost, one
+must be content to leave alone all those people that one can reach
+only by sentimentalizing. But Amanda--and yet somehow I love her for
+it still--could not leave any one alone. So she was always feverishly
+weaving nets of false relationship. Until her very self was forgotten.
+So she will go on until the end. With Easton it had been necessary for
+her to key herself to a simple exalted romanticism that was entirely
+insincere. She had so accustomed herself to these poses that her innate
+gestures were forgotten. She could not recover them; she could not
+even reinvent them. Between us there were momentary gleams as though
+presently we should be our frank former selves again. They were never
+more than momentary...."
+
+And that was all that this astonishing man had seen fit to tell of his
+last parting from his wife.
+
+Perhaps he did Amanda injustice. Perhaps there was a stronger thread
+of reality in her desire to recover him than he supposed. Clearly he
+believed that under the circumstances Amanda would have tried to recover
+anybody.
+
+She had dressed for that morning's encounter in a very becoming and
+intimate wrap of soft mauve and white silk, and she had washed and dried
+her dark hair so that it was a vapour about her face. She set herself
+with a single mind to persuade herself and Benham that they were
+inseparable lovers, and she would not be deflected by his grim
+determination to discuss the conditions of their separation. When he
+asked her whether she wanted a divorce, she offered to throw over
+Sir Philip and banish him for ever as lightly as a great lady might
+sacrifice an objectionable poodle to her connubial peace.
+
+Benham passed through perplexing phases, so that she herself began to
+feel that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands. His initial
+grimness she could understand, and partially its breakdown into
+irritability. But she was puzzled by his laughter. For he laughed
+abruptly.
+
+"You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of tremendous tragedy. And
+really,--you are a Lark."
+
+And then overriding her altogether, he told her what he meant to do
+about their future and the future of their little son.
+
+"You don't want a divorce and a fuss. Then I'll leave things. I perceive
+I've no intention of marrying any more. But you'd better do the straight
+thing. People forget and forgive. Especially when there is no one about
+making a fuss against you.
+
+"Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for shirking it.
+We'll both be able to get at the boy then. You'll not hurt him, and
+I shall want to see him. It's better for the boy anyhow not to have a
+divorce.
+
+"I'll not stand in your way. I'll get a little flat and I shan't come
+too much to London, and when I do, you can get out of town. You must be
+discreet about Easton, and if people say anything about him, send them
+to me. After all, this is our private affair.
+
+"We'll go on about money matters as we have been going. I trust to you
+not to run me into overwhelming debts. And, of course, if at any time,
+you do want to marry--on account of children or anything--if nobody
+knows of this conversation we can be divorced then...."
+
+Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while Amanda
+gathered her forces for her last appeal.
+
+It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down
+before him and clung to his knees. He struggled ridiculously to get
+himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate on
+the floor with her dishevelled hair about her.
+
+She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark
+Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet
+without. He had come back. The door reopened. There was a slight pause,
+and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the second
+housemaid. There are moments, suspended fragments of time rather than
+links in its succession, when the human eye is more intelligible than
+any words.
+
+The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a click of
+the door.
+
+"DAMN!" said Amanda.
+
+Then slowly she rose to her knees.
+
+She meditated through vast moments.
+
+"It's a cursed thing to be a woman," said Amanda. She stood up. She put
+her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot about it.
+After another long interval of thought she spoke.
+
+"Cheetah!" she said, "Old Cheetah!...
+
+"I didn't THINK it of you...."
+
+Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a
+reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who
+packs a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.
+
+
+
+30
+
+
+The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in
+Danebury Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham's private
+processes the morning after this affair.
+
+Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London. She
+had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly
+decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to
+behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way. On the
+morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor waiter that the
+occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar in the night, and almost
+immediately she was summoned to see Benham.
+
+He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little
+obscure the condition of the room behind him. He was carefully dressed,
+and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever. But one of his
+hands was tied up in a white bandage.
+
+"I am going this morning," he said, "I am going down now to breakfast. I
+have had a few little accidents with some of the things in the room and
+I have cut my hand. I want you to tell the manager and see that they are
+properly charged for on the bill.... Thank you."
+
+The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.
+
+Benham's things were all packed up and the room had an air of having
+been straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive
+cataclysm. One or two items that the chambermaid might possibly have
+overlooked in the normal course of things were carefully exhibited. For
+example, the sheet had been torn into half a dozen strips and they were
+lying side by side on the bed. The clock on the mantelpiece had
+been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded to pieces. All the
+looking-glasses in the room were smashed, apparently the electric lamp
+that stood on the night table by the bedside had been wrenched off and
+flung or hammered about amidst the other breakables. And there was
+a considerable amount of blood splashed about the room. The head
+chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the spectacle and
+summoned her most convenient friend, the head chambermaid on the third
+floor, to her aid. The first-floor waiter joined their deliberations
+and several housemaids displayed a respectful interest in the matter.
+Finally they invoked the manager. He was still contemplating the scene
+of the disorder when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates warned
+him of Benham's return.
+
+Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly
+tranquil.
+
+"I had a kind of nightmare," he said. "I am fearfully sorry to have
+disarranged your room. You must charge me for the inconvenience as well
+as for the damage."
+
+
+
+31
+
+
+"An aristocrat cannot be a lover."
+
+"One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of life
+and the intricacies of another human being. I do not mean that one may
+not love. One loves the more because one does not concentrate one's
+love. One loves nations, the people passing in the street, beasts hurt
+by the wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons in tears....
+
+"But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's hands
+I do not think one can expect to be loved.
+
+"An aristocrat must do without close personal love...."
+
+This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper. The writing ended
+halfway down the page. Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it
+was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter
+that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations. Its incompleteness
+made its expression perfect....
+
+There Benham's love experience ended. He turned to the great business
+of the world. Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like
+Fear they were to be dismissed as far as possible and subdued when
+they could not be altogether dismissed. Whatever stirrings of blood or
+imagination there were in him after that parting, whatever failures from
+this resolution, they left no trace on the rest of his research, which
+was concerned with the hates of peoples and classes and war and peace
+and the possibilities science unveils and starry speculations of what
+mankind may do.
+
+
+
+32
+
+
+But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter
+with Lady Marayne.
+
+The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger and
+distress. Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so hopelessly
+dispersed and mixed. And when for a moment it seemed to him that she was
+not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all, then with an instant
+eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory gleam. "What are you doing
+in England, Poff?" she demanded. "And what are you going to do?
+
+"Nothing! And you are going to leave her in your house, with your
+property and a lover. If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come back?
+And why did you ever marry her? You might have known; her father was a
+swindler. She's begotten of deceit. She'll tell her own story while you
+are away, and a pretty story she'll make of it."
+
+"Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?"
+
+"I never wanted you to go away from her. If you'd stayed and watched her
+as a man should, as I begged you and implored you to do. Didn't I tell
+you, Poff? Didn't I warn you?"
+
+"But now what am I to do?"
+
+"There you are! That's just a man's way. You get yourself into this
+trouble, you follow your passions and your fancies and fads and then
+you turn to me! How can I help you now, Poff? If you'd listened to me
+before!"
+
+Her blue eyes were demonstratively round.
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"I warned you," she interrupted. "I warned you. I've done all I could
+for you. It isn't that I haven't seen through her. When she came to me
+at first with that made-up story of a baby! And all about loving me like
+her own mother. But I did what I could. I thought we might still make
+the best of a bad job. And then--. I might have known she couldn't leave
+Pip alone.... But for weeks I didn't dream. I wouldn't dream. Right
+under my nose. The impudence of it!"
+
+Her voice broke. "Such a horrid mess! Such a hopeless, horrid mess!"
+
+She wiped away a bright little tear....
+
+"It's all alike. It's your way with us. All of you. There isn't a man
+in the world deserves to have a woman in the world. We do all we can
+for you. We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for you and we talk for
+you. All the sweet, warm little women there are! And then you go away
+from us! There never was a woman yet who pleased and satisfied a man,
+who did not lose him. Give you everything and off you must go! Lovers,
+mothers...."
+
+It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother's troubles did not deal
+exclusively with himself.
+
+"But Amanda," he began.
+
+"If you'd looked after her properly, it would have been right enough.
+Pip was as good as gold until she undermined him.... A woman can't wait
+about like an umbrella in a stand.... He was just a boy.... Only of
+course there she was--a novelty. It is perfectly easy to understand. She
+flattered him.... Men are such fools."
+
+"Still--it's no good saying that now."
+
+"But she'll spend all your money, Poff! She'll break your back with
+debts. What's to prevent her? With him living on her! For that's what it
+comes to practically."
+
+"Well, what am I to do?"
+
+"You aren't going back without tying her up, Poff? You ought to stop
+every farthing of her money--every farthing. It's your duty."
+
+"I can't do things like that."
+
+"But have you no Shame? To let that sort of thing go on!"
+
+"If I don't feel the Shame of it-- And I don't."
+
+"And that money--. I got you that money, Poff! It was my money."
+
+Benham stared at her perplexed. "What am I to do?" he asked.
+
+"Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay her through a solicitor.
+Say that if she sees him ONCE again--"
+
+He reflected. "No," he said at last.
+
+"Poff!" she cried, "every time I see you, you are more and more like
+your father. You're going off--just as he did. That baffled, MULISH
+look--priggish--solemn! Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor woman has to
+bring into the world. But you'll do nothing. I know you'll do nothing.
+You'll stand everything. You--you Cuckold! And she'll drive by me,
+she'll pass me in theatres with the money that ought to have been mine!
+Oh! Oh!"
+
+She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other. But she
+went on talking. Faster and faster, less and less coherently; more and
+more wildly abusive. Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham
+sighed profoundly....
+
+It brought the scene to a painful end....
+
+For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.
+
+He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in
+default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her--he
+could never define what he owed her.
+
+And yet, what on earth was one to do?
+
+And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had
+misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred
+goodwill. He went down to see him before he returned to India. But if
+there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham senior, it had been
+very carefully boarded over. The parental mind and attention were
+entirely engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD about the heuristic
+method. Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the
+thing was rankling almost unendurably. It seemed to be a relief to him
+to show his son very fully the essentially illogical position of his
+assailant. He was entirely inattentive to Benham's carefully made
+conversational opportunities. He would be silent at times while Benham
+talked and then he would break out suddenly with: "What seems to me
+so unreasonable, so ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second
+argument--if one can call it an argument--.... A man who reasons as he
+does is bound to get laughed at. If people will only see it...."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913. Sometimes
+the two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection,
+sometimes with great bitterness. When he met White in Johannesburg
+during the strike period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in London
+and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite footing.
+It was her suggestion that they should meet.
+
+About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction. He could not
+persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his relations to
+her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at no
+precise point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ignoble
+step. Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life. Like
+all of us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life
+in a certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an
+entirely different and unexpected way.... He had been ready for noble
+deeds and villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the
+dominant fact of his personal life was a perplexing riddle. He could
+not hate and condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of
+exoneration; he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without
+immediate shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he
+could not banish her from his mind.
+
+During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his
+mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but
+often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing
+denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing
+accepted. Meanwhile he worked. His nervous irritability increased, but
+it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.
+
+Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and
+method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put
+together under his headings of the first three "Limitations." He
+had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that
+instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which
+he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of
+Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda.
+He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown that beating in his
+brain.
+
+Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
+prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this dream
+of a larger human purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and
+define that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and
+comprehending form of all the activities of the noble life. One cannot
+be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to
+an end. To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing more
+comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous and coherent than it is
+to-day seemed to him the fundamental intention of all nobility. He
+believed more and more firmly that the impulses to make and help and
+subserve great purposes are abundantly present in the world, that they
+are inhibited by hasty thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and
+that the real ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a
+release. He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men
+dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and
+he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult
+limitation. In one place he had written it, "Prejudice or Divisions."
+That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in the measure of
+its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great age, the noble age,
+would begin.
+
+So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world
+about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties
+and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White
+struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of
+this search for "Prejudice." It seemed to White to be at once the most
+magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises. It was indeed no
+less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure
+and disorder.... And it was all too manifest to White also that the last
+place in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the
+back of his own head.
+
+Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array
+of influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of
+patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence
+of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the
+purely personal dissensions between man and man. And he developed a
+metaphysical interpretation of these troubles. "No doubt," he wrote in
+one place, "much of the evil between different kinds of men is due to
+uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to
+bad thinking." At times he seemed on the verge of the persuasion that
+most human trouble is really due to bad metaphysics. It was, one must
+remark, an extraordinary journey he had made; he had started from
+chivalry and arrived at metaphysics; every knight he held must be a
+logician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the mind. One thinks of his
+coming to this conclusion with knit brows and balancing intentness
+above whole gulfs of bathos--very much as he had once walked the Leysin
+Bisse....
+
+"Men do not know how to think," he insisted--getting along the
+planks; "and they will not realize that they do not know how to
+think. Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of
+misconceptions.... Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the mind,
+and muddled thinking as ignoble as dirty conduct.... Infinitely more
+disastrous."
+
+And again he wrote: "Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too
+eager to get into action. There is our deepest trouble. He takes
+conclusions ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry. Life is so short
+that he thinks it better to err than wait. He has no patience, no faith
+in anything but himself. He thinks he is a being when in reality he is
+only a link in a being, and so he is more anxious to be complete than
+right. The last devotion of which he is capable is that devotion of
+the mind which suffers partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive
+thought. He scamps his thought and finishes his performance, and before
+he is dead it is already being abandoned and begun all over again by
+some one else in the same egotistical haste...."
+
+It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these words
+should have been written by a man who walked the plank to fresh ideas
+with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward,
+and who acted time after time with an altogether disastrous hastiness.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the
+cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice
+and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research
+Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays
+and abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale,
+than you can profess religion and refuse to think about God. In the past
+it was possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to
+unexamined things. One could be loyal to unexamined things because they
+were unchallenged things. But now everything is challenged. By the
+time of his second visit to Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious
+and deliberate aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal
+responsibility had already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he
+was, as it were, an uncrowned king in the world. To be noble is to
+be aristocratic, that is to say, a ruler. Thence it follows that
+aristocracy is multiple kingship, and to be an aristocrat is to partake
+both of the nature of philosopher and king....
+
+Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no
+means necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in quality,
+petty in spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and limited,
+fall far short of kingship. Nevertheless, there IS nobility, there
+IS kingship, or this earth is a dustbin and mankind but a kind of
+skin-disease upon a planet. From that it is an easy step to this idea,
+the idea whose first expression had already so touched the imagination
+of Amanda, of a sort of diffused and voluntary kingship scattered
+throughout mankind. The aristocrats are not at the high table, the
+kings are not enthroned, those who are enthroned are but pretenders and
+SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar; the real king and ruler is every man who
+sets aside the naive passions and self-interest of the common life for
+the rule and service of the world.
+
+This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary writing. It
+is one of those ideas that seem to appear simultaneously at many points
+in the world, and it is impossible to say now how far Benham was
+an originator of this idea, and how far he simply resonated to its
+expression by others. It was far more likely that Prothero, getting it
+heaven knows where, had spluttered it out and forgotten it, leaving it
+to germinate in the mind of his friend....
+
+This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to
+Benham as his life went on. When Benham walked the Bisse he was just
+a youngster resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled in the
+jungle by night he was there for all mankind. With every year he became
+more and more definitely to himself a consecrated man as kings are
+consecrated. Only that he was self-consecrated, and anointed only in
+his heart. At last he was, so to speak, Haroun al Raschid again, going
+unsuspected about the world, because the palace of his security would
+not tell him the secrets of men's disorders. He was no longer a creature
+of circumstances, he was kingly, unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the
+Danes. In the great later accumulations of his Research the personal
+matter, the introspection, the intimate discussion of motive, becomes
+less and less. He forgets himself in the exaltation of kingliness. He
+worries less and less over the particular rightness of his
+definite acts. In these later papers White found Benham abstracted,
+self-forgetful, trying to find out with an ever increased
+self-detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why there are
+massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why we let famine, disease
+and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast multitudes in the
+midst of possible plenty. And when he found out and as far as he found
+out, he meant quite simply and earnestly to apply his knowledge....
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The intellectualism of Benham intensified to the end. His definition of
+Prejudice impressed White as being the most bloodless and philosophical
+formula that ever dominated the mind of a man.
+
+"Prejudice," Benham had written, "is that common incapacity of the human
+mind to understand that a difference in any respect is not a difference
+in all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by an instinctive
+hostility to what is unlike ourselves. We exaggerate classification and
+then charge it with mischievous emotion by referring it to ourselves."
+And under this comprehensive formula he proceeded to study and attack
+Family Prejudice, National Prejudice, Race Prejudice, War, Class
+Prejudice, Professional Prejudice, Sex Prejudice, in the most
+industrious and elaborate manner. Whether one regards one's self or
+others he held that these prejudices are evil things. "From the point
+of view of human welfare they break men up into wars and conflicts,
+make them an easy prey to those who trade upon suspicion and hostility,
+prevent sane collective co-operations, cripple and embitter life. From
+the point of view of personal aristocracy they make men vulgar, violent,
+unjust and futile. All the conscious life of the aristocrat must be a
+constant struggle against false generalizations; it is as much his duty
+to free himself from that as from fear, indulgence, and jealousy; it is
+a larger and more elaborate task, but it is none the less cardinal and
+essential. Indeed it is more cardinal and essential. The true knight has
+to be not only no coward, no self-pamperer, no egotist. He has to be a
+philosopher. He has to be no hasty or foolish thinker. His judgment no
+more than his courage is to be taken by surprise.
+
+"To subdue fear, desire and jealousy, is the aristocrat's personal
+affair, it is his ritual and discipline, like a knight watching his
+arms; but the destruction of division and prejudice and all their
+forms and establishments, is his real task, that is the common work of
+knighthood. It is a task to be done in a thousand ways; one man working
+by persuasion, another by example, this one overthrowing some crippling
+restraint upon the freedom of speech and the spread of knowledge,
+and that preparing himself for a war that will shatter a tyrannous
+presumption. Most imaginative literature, all scientific investigation,
+all sound criticism, all good building, all good manufacture, all sound
+politics, every honesty and every reasoned kindliness contribute to this
+release of men from the heat and confusions of our present world."
+
+It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part of
+his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he was not
+making his own personal research alone, but, side by side with a vast,
+masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of others; that this great
+idea of his was under kindred forms the great idea of thousands, that
+it was breaking as the dawn breaks, simultaneously to great numbers of
+people, and that the time was not far off when the new aristocracy, the
+disguised rulers of the world, would begin to realize their common
+bent and effort. Into these latter papers there creeps more and more
+frequently a new phraseology, such expressions as the "Invisible King"
+and the "Spirit of Kingship," so that as Benham became personally more
+and more solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.
+
+Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of mankind.
+He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices worked, to get
+at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of prejudice, and to
+devise means for its treatment, destruction or neutralization. He had no
+great faith in the power of pure reasonableness; his psychological ideas
+were modern, and he had grasped the fact that the power of most of the
+great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual
+level. Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
+with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to
+discover their sub-rational springs.
+
+A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven
+Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience
+decided could not possibly "make a book," consisted of notes and
+discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this
+or that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary
+trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in
+Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom he had his first really
+illuminating encounter with race and culture prejudice. His examination
+of the social and political condition of Russia seems to have left him
+much more hopeful than was the common feeling of liberal-minded people
+during the years of depression that followed the revolution of 1906, and
+it was upon the race question that his attention concentrated.
+
+The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India. Here in an entirely
+different environment was another discord of race and culture, and
+he found in his study of it much that illuminated and corrected his
+impressions of the Russian issue. A whole drawer was devoted to a
+comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into human dissensions
+in lower Bengal. Here there were not only race but culture conflicts,
+and he could work particularly upon the differences between men of the
+same race who were Hindus, Christians and Mahometans respectively.
+He could compare the Bengali Mahometan not only with the Bengali
+Brahminist, but also with the Mahometan from the north-west. "If one
+could scrape off all the creed and training, would one find much the
+same thing at the bottom, or something fundamentally so different that
+no close homogeneous social life and not even perhaps a life of just
+compromise is possible between the different races of mankind?"
+
+His answer to that was a confident one. "There are no such natural and
+unalterable differences in character and quality between any two sorts
+of men whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly co-operation in
+the world impossible," he wrote.
+
+But he was not satisfied with his observations in India. He found the
+prevalence of caste ideas antipathetic and complicating. He went on
+after his last parting from Amanda into China, it was the first of
+several visits to China, and thence he crossed to America. White found a
+number of American press-cuttings of a vehemently anti-Japanese quality
+still awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it was clear to him that
+Benham had given a considerable amount of attention to the development
+of the "white" and "yellow" race hostility on the Pacific slope; but his
+chief interest at that time had been the negro. He went to Washington
+and thence south; he visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at
+a tangent to Hayti. He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid
+book, WHERE BLACK RULES WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able
+to visit that wonderful monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La
+Ferriere, the citadel built a century ago by the "Black Napoleon," the
+Emperor Christophe. He went with a young American demonstrator from
+Harvard.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It was a memorable excursion. They rode from Cap Haytien for a day's
+journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of luxurious
+vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of unbridled jungle
+with populous country. They passed countless villages of thatched huts
+alive with curiosity and swarming with naked black children, and yet all
+the time they seemed to be in a wilderness. They forded rivers, they had
+at times to force themselves through thickets, once or twice they
+lost their way, and always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great
+mountain peak with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the
+background until it dominated the landscape. Long after dark they
+blundered upon rather than came to the village at its foot where they
+were to pass the night. They were interrogated under a flaring torch by
+peering ragged black soldiers, and passed through a firelit crowd into
+the presence of the local commandant to dispute volubly about their
+right to go further. They might have been in some remote corner of
+Nigeria. Their papers, laboriously got in order, were vitiated by the
+fact, which only became apparent by degrees, that the commandant could
+not read. They carried their point with difficulty.
+
+But they carried their point, and, watched and guarded by a hungry
+half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of
+trousers, they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of
+imperialism that humanity has ever made. The roads and parks and
+prospects constructed by this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long
+since disappeared, and the three men clambered for hours up ravines and
+precipitous jungle tracks, occasionally crossing the winding traces of
+a choked and ruined road that had once been the lordly approach to his
+fastness. Below they passed an abandoned palace of vast extent, a palace
+with great terraces and the still traceable outline of gardens, though
+there were green things pushing between the terrace steps, and trees
+thrust out of the empty windows. Here from a belvedere of which the
+skull-like vestige still remained, the negro Emperor Christophe, after
+fourteen years of absolute rule, had watched for a time the smoke of the
+burning of his cane-fields in the plain below, and then, learning that
+his bodyguard had deserted him, had gone in and blown out his brains.
+
+He had christened the place after the best of examples, "Sans Souci."
+
+But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he never
+used. The defection of his guards made him abandon that. To build it,
+they say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives. He had the true Imperial
+lavishness. So high it was, so lost in a wilderness of trees and bush,
+looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch
+and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky--for even the
+guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in
+its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside its walls--and at the
+same time so huge and grandiose--there were walls thirty feet thick,
+galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls,
+king's apartments and queen's apartments, towering battlements and
+great arched doorways--that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and
+passing of that miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing
+of multitudes before one man and the transitoriness of such glories,
+more completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world
+before. Beneath the battlements--they are choked above with jungle grass
+and tamarinds and many flowery weeds--the precipice fell away a sheer
+two thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain populous and
+diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an amethystine wall.
+Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling his victims, and below
+this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons where men, broken and torn,
+thrust in at the neck-like hole above, starved and died: it was his
+headquarters here, here he had his torture chambers and the means for
+nameless cruelties....
+
+"Not a hundred years ago," said Benham's companion, and told the story
+of the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.
+
+"Leap," said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one
+questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last
+gesture of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed, and
+with a convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down through the
+shimmering air.
+
+Came presently the little faint sound of his fall.
+
+The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this
+projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and
+presently struggled and found itself still a living man. It could
+scramble down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for mercy.
+An hour and it stood before Christophe again, with an arm broken and
+bloody and a face torn, a battered thing now but with a faint flavour of
+pride in its bearing. "Your bidding has been done, Sire," it said.
+
+"So," said the Emperor, unappeased. "And you live? Well-- Leap
+again...."
+
+And then came other stories. The young man told them as he had heard
+them, stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men standing along
+the walls of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by one as the feast
+went on, of exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and his one note of
+wonder, his refrain was, "HERE! Not a hundred years ago.... It makes one
+almost believe that somewhere things of this sort are being done now."
+
+They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins. The
+lizards which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the
+sunshine. The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his black
+fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a search for
+some saleable memento....
+
+Benham sat musing in silence. The thought of deliberate cruelty was
+always an actual physical distress to him. He sat bathed in the dreamy
+afternoon sunlight and struggled against the pictures that crowded
+into his mind, pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-driven men
+toiling in agony, and of the shame of extorted obedience and of cringing
+and crawling black figures, and the defiance of righteous hate beaten
+down under blow and anguish. He saw eyes alight with terror and lips
+rolled back in agony, he saw weary hopeless flight before striding proud
+destruction, he saw the poor trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in
+his soul....
+
+He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride, and
+then the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes Christophes
+but humility.
+
+There is in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his
+superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking
+individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience. Every natural
+sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a
+definite direction for his own partial life. At the bottom of his heart
+he feels, even if he does not know it definitely, that his life is
+partial. He is driven to join himself on. He obeys decision and the
+appearance of strength as a horse obeys its rider's voice. One thinks
+of the pride, the uncontrolled frantic will of this black ape of all
+Emperors, and one forgets the universal docility that made him possible.
+Usurpation is a crime to which men are tempted by human dirigibility.
+It is the orderly peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much
+restraint above as stiff insubordination below that has to be taught to
+men. There are kings and tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of
+the unkingliness of men.
+
+And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, Benham cast off from
+his mind his last tolerance for earthly kings and existing States, and
+expounded to another human being for the first time this long-cherished
+doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is the lord of human destiny,
+the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the sceptre and rule the
+earth.... To the young American's naive American response to any simply
+felt emotion, he seemed with his white earnestness and his glowing eyes
+a veritable prophet....
+
+"This is the root idea of aristocracy," said Benham.
+
+"I have never heard the underlying spirit of democracy, the real true
+Thing in democracy, so thoroughly expressed," said the young American.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Benham's notes on race and racial cultures gave White tantalizing
+glimpses of a number of picturesque experiences. The adventure in Kieff
+had first roused Benham to the reality of racial quality. He was caught
+in the wheels of a pogrom.
+
+"Before that time I had been disposed to minimize and deny race. I still
+think it need not prevent men from the completest social co-operation,
+but I see now better than I did how difficult it is for any man to purge
+from his mind the idea that he is not primarily a Jew, a Teuton, or a
+Kelt, but a man. You can persuade any one in five minutes that he or she
+belongs to some special and blessed and privileged sort of human
+being; it takes a lifetime to destroy that persuasion. There are these
+confounded differences of colour, of eye and brow, of nose or hair,
+small differences in themselves except that they give a foothold and
+foundation for tremendous fortifications of prejudice and tradition, in
+which hostilities and hatreds may gather. When I think of a Jew's nose,
+a Chinaman's eyes or a negro's colour I am reminded of that fatal little
+pit which nature has left in the vermiform appendix, a thing no use in
+itself and of no significance, but a gathering-place for mischief. The
+extremest case of race-feeling is the Jewish case, and even here, I am
+convinced, it is the Bible and the Talmud and the exertions of those
+inevitable professional champions who live upon racial feeling, far more
+than their common distinction of blood, which holds this people together
+banded against mankind."
+
+Between the lines of such general propositions as this White read little
+scraps of intimation that linked with the things Benham let fall in
+Johannesburg to reconstruct the Kieff adventure.
+
+Benham had been visiting a friend in the country on the further side
+of the Dnieper. As they drove back along dusty stretches of road amidst
+fields of corn and sunflower and through bright little villages, they
+saw against the evening blue under the full moon a smoky red glare
+rising from amidst the white houses and dark trees of the town. "The
+pogrom's begun," said Benham's friend, and was surprised when Benham
+wanted to end a pleasant day by going to see what happens after the
+beginning of a pogrom.
+
+He was to have several surprises before at last he left Benham in
+disgust and went home by himself.
+
+For Benham, with that hastiness that so flouted his exalted theories,
+passed rapidly from an attitude of impartial enquiry to active
+intervention. The two men left their carriage and plunged into
+the network of unlovely dark streets in which the Jews and traders
+harboured.... Benham's first intervention was on behalf of a crouching
+and yelping bundle of humanity that was being dragged about and kicked
+at a street corner. The bundle resolved itself into a filthy little old
+man, and made off with extraordinary rapidity, while Benham remonstrated
+with the kickers. Benham's tallness, his very Gentile face, his good
+clothes, and an air of tense authority about him had its effect, and
+the kickers shuffled off with remarks that were partly apologies. But
+Benham's friend revolted. This was no business of theirs.
+
+Benham went on unaccompanied towards the glare of the burning houses.
+
+For a time he watched. Black figures moved between him and the glare,
+and he tried to find out the exact nature of the conflict by enquiries
+in clumsy Russian. He was told that the Jews had insulted a religious
+procession, that a Jew had spat at an ikon, that the shop of a cheating
+Jew trader had been set on fire, and that the blaze had spread to the
+adjacent group of houses. He gathered that the Jews were running out of
+the burning block on the other side "like rats." The crowd was mostly
+composed of town roughs with a sprinkling of peasants. They were
+mischievous but undecided. Among them were a number of soldiers, and
+he was surprised to see a policemen, brightly lit from head to foot,
+watching the looting of a shop that was still untouched by the flames.
+
+He held back some men who had discovered a couple of women's figures
+slinking along in the shadow beneath a wall. Behind his remonstrances
+the Jewesses escaped. His anger against disorder was growing upon
+him....
+
+Late that night Benham found himself the leading figure amidst a party
+of Jews who had made a counter attack upon a gang of roughs in a court
+that had become the refuge of a crowd of fugitives. Some of the young
+Jewish men had already been making a fight, rather a poor and hopeless
+fight, from the windows of the house near the entrance of the court, but
+it is doubtful if they would have made an effective resistance if it
+had not been for this tall excited stranger who was suddenly shouting
+directions to them in sympathetically murdered Russian. It was not that
+he brought powerful blows or subtle strategy to their assistance, but
+that he put heart into them and perplexity into his adversaries because
+he was so manifestly non-partizan. Nobody could ever have mistaken
+Benham for a Jew. When at last towards dawn a not too zealous governor
+called out the troops and began to clear the streets of rioters, Benham
+and a band of Jews were still keeping the gateway of that court behind a
+hasty but adequate barricade of furniture and handbarrows.
+
+The ghetto could not understand him, nobody could understand him, but it
+was clear a rare and precious visitor had come to their rescue, and he
+was implored by a number of elderly, dirty, but very intelligent-looking
+old men to stay with them and preserve them until their safety was
+assured.
+
+They could not understand him, but they did their utmost to entertain
+him and assure him of their gratitude. They seemed to consider him as
+a representative of the British Government, and foreign intervention on
+their behalf is one of those unfortunate fixed ideas that no persecuted
+Jews seem able to abandon.
+
+Benham found himself, refreshed and tended, sitting beside a wood fire
+in an inner chamber richly flavoured by humanity and listening to a
+discourse in evil but understandable German. It was a discourse upon the
+wrongs and the greatness of the Jewish people--and it was delivered by
+a compact middle-aged man with a big black beard and long-lashed but
+animated eyes. Beside him a very old man dozed and nodded approval. A
+number of other men crowded the apartment, including several who had
+helped to hold off the rioters from the court. Some could follow the
+talk and ever again endorsed the speaker in Yiddish or Russian; others
+listened with tantalized expressions, their brows knit, their lips
+moving.
+
+It was a discourse Benham had provoked. For now he was at the very heart
+of the Jewish question, and he could get some light upon the mystery
+of this great hatred at first hand. He did not want to hear tales of
+outrages, of such things he knew, but he wanted to understand what was
+the irritation that caused these things.
+
+So he listened. The Jew dilated at first on the harmlessness and
+usefulness of the Jews.
+
+"But do you never take a certain advantage?" Benham threw out.
+
+"The Jews are cleverer than the Russians. Must we suffer for that?"
+
+The spokesman went on to the more positive virtues of his race. Benham
+suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling of the Gentile who finds a bill
+being made against him. Did the world owe Israel nothing for Philo,
+Aron ben Asher, Solomon Gabriol, Halevy, Mendelssohn, Heine, Meyerbeer,
+Rubinstein, Joachim, Zangwill? Does Britain owe nothing to Lord
+Beaconsfield, Montefiore or the Rothschilds? Can France repudiate her
+debt to Fould, Gaudahaux, Oppert, or Germany to Furst, Steinschneider,
+Herxheimer, Lasker, Auerbach, Traube and Lazarus and Benfey?...
+
+Benham admitted under the pressure of urgent tones and gestures that
+these names did undoubtedly include the cream of humanity, but was it
+not true that the Jews did press a little financially upon the inferior
+peoples whose lands they honoured in their exile?
+
+The man with the black beard took up the challenge bravely.
+
+"They are merciful creditors," he said. "And it is their genius to
+possess and control. What better stewards could you find for the wealth
+of nations than the Jews? And for the honours? That always had been the
+role of the Jews--stewardship. Since the days of Joseph in Egypt...."
+
+Then in a lower voice he went on to speak of the deficiencies of the
+Gentile population. He wished to be just and generous but the truth was
+the truth. The Christian Russians loved drink and laziness; they had no
+sense of property; were it not for unjust laws even now the Jews would
+possess all the land of South Russia....
+
+Benham listened with a kind of fascination. "But," he said.
+
+It was so. And with a confidence that aroused a protest or so from the
+onlookers, the Jewish apologist suddenly rose up, opened a safe close
+beside the fire and produced an armful of documents.
+
+"Look!" he said, "all over South Russia there are these!"
+
+Benham was a little slow to understand, until half a dozen of these
+papers had been thrust into his hand. Eager fingers pointed, and several
+voices spoke. These things were illegalities that might some day be
+legal; there were the records of loans and hidden transactions that
+might at any time put all the surrounding soil into the hands of the
+Jew. All South Russia was mortgaged....
+
+"But is it so?" asked Benham, and for a time ceased to listen and stared
+into the fire.
+
+Then he held up the papers in his hand to secure silence and, feeling
+his way in unaccustomed German, began to speak and continued to speak in
+spite of a constant insurgent undertone of interruption from the Jewish
+spokesman.
+
+All men, Benham said, were brothers. Did they not remember Nathan the
+Wise?
+
+"I did not claim him," said the spokesman, misunderstanding. "He is a
+character in fiction."
+
+But all men are brothers, Benham maintained. They had to be merciful to
+one another and give their gifts freely to one another. Also they had
+to consider each other's weaknesses. The Jews were probably justified
+in securing and administering the property of every community into which
+they came, they were no doubt right in claiming to be best fitted for
+that task, but also they had to consider, perhaps more than they did,
+the feelings and vanities of the host population into which they brought
+these beneficent activities. What was said of the ignorance, incapacity
+and vice of the Roumanians and Russians was very generally believed and
+accepted, but it did not alter the fact that the peasant, for all his
+incapacity, did like to imagine he owned his own patch and hovel and did
+have a curious irrational hatred of debt....
+
+The faces about Benham looked perplexed.
+
+"THIS," said Benham, tapping the papers in his hand. "They will not
+understand the ultimate benefit of it. It will be a source of anger
+and fresh hostility. It does not follow because your race has supreme
+financial genius that you must always follow its dictates to the
+exclusion of other considerations...."
+
+The perplexity increased.
+
+Benham felt he must be more general. He went on to emphasize the
+brotherhood of man, the right to equal opportunity, equal privilege,
+freedom to develop their idiosyncrasies as far as possible, unhindered
+by the idiosyncrasies of others. He could feel the sympathy and
+understanding of his hearers returning. "You see," said Benham, "you
+must have generosity. You must forget ancient scores. Do you not see the
+world must make a fresh beginning?"
+
+He was entirely convinced he had them with him. The heads nodded assent,
+the bright eyes and lips followed the slow disentanglement of his bad
+German.
+
+"Free yourselves and the world," he said.
+
+Applause.
+
+"And so," he said breaking unconsciously into English, "let us begin by
+burning these BEASTLY mortgages!"
+
+And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the
+fire. The assenting faces became masks of horror. A score of hands
+clutched at those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger filled
+the room. Some one caught at his throat from behind. "Don't kill him!"
+cried some one. "He fought for us!"
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled
+and battered condition to his hotel. He found his friend in anxious
+consultation with the hotel proprietor.
+
+"We were afraid that something had happened to you," said his friend.
+
+"I got a little involved," said Benham.
+
+"Hasn't some one clawed your cheek?"
+
+"Very probably," said Benham.
+
+"And torn your coat? And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?"
+
+"It was a complicated misunderstanding," said Benham. "Oh! pardon! I'm
+rather badly bruised upon that arm you're holding."
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.
+
+"I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my point of
+view," he said....
+
+"I'm not sure if they quite followed my German....
+
+"It's odd, too, that I remember saying, 'Let's burn these mortgages,'
+and at the time I'm almost sure I didn't know the German for
+mortgage...."
+
+It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to
+grasp the full intention behind Benham's proceedings. His aristocratic
+impulses were apt to run away with his conceptions of brotherhood, and
+time after time it was only too manifest to White that Benham's
+pallid flash of anger had astonished the subjects of his disinterested
+observations extremely. His explorations in Hayti had been terminated
+abruptly by an affair with a native policeman that had necessitated the
+intervention of the British Consul. It was begun with that suddenness
+that was too often characteristic of Benham, by his hitting the
+policeman. It was in the main street of Cap Haytien, and the policeman
+had just clubbed an unfortunate youth over the head with the heavily
+loaded wooden club which is the normal instrument of Haytien discipline.
+His blow was a repartee, part of a triangular altercation in which a
+large, voluble, mahogany-coloured lady whose head was tied up in a
+blue handkerchief played a conspicuous part, but it seemed to Benham an
+entirely unjustifiable blow.
+
+He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had been
+gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince to carry
+him away. He advanced with the kind of shout one would hurl at a dog,
+and smote the policeman to the earth with the stout stick that the
+peculiar social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him to carry. By the
+local standard his blow was probably a trivial one, but the moral effect
+of his indignant pallor and a sort of rearing tallness about him
+on these occasions was always very considerable. Unhappily these
+characteristics could have no effect on a second negro policeman who was
+approaching the affray from behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on
+the shoulder that was meant for the head, and with the assistance of his
+colleague overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.
+
+The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to the
+lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer's superior
+knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his British
+citizenship.
+
+The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German gunboat
+was still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed it that in
+spite of his blank refusal to compensate the man he had knocked over, he
+was after two days of anger, two days of extreme insanitary experience,
+and much meditation upon his unphilosophical hastiness, released.
+
+Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified his
+enquiries into Indian conditions. They too turned for the most part
+on his facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt desire for
+human brotherhood. At last indeed came an affair that refused ultimately
+to remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil that invoked newspaper
+articles and heated controversies.
+
+The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
+attraction and irritation. He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
+intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
+infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India
+into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to the
+other. "I came to see India," he wrote, "and there is no India. There is
+a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin in the air,
+quietly scorning everybody else."
+
+His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste began
+with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had turned an
+Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and culminated in
+a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness at Benares, who had
+thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham's shadow
+had fallen upon it.
+
+"You unendurable snob!" said Benham, and then lapsing into the forceful
+and inadvisable: "By Heaven, you SHALL eat it!..."
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Benham's detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep in
+his character as to seem almost instinctive. But he had too a very clear
+reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in human continuity
+in his sense of the gathering dangers they now involve. They had always,
+he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and the destruction
+of human dignity, but the new conditions of life that have been brought
+about by modern science were making them far more dangerous than they
+had ever been before. He believed that the evil and horror of war was
+becoming more and more tremendous with every decade, and that the free
+play of national prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness
+that seems to be inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate
+catastrophe, unless a real international aristocracy could be brought
+into being to prevent it.
+
+In the drawer full of papers labelled "Politics," White found a paper
+called "The Metal Beast." It showed that for a time Benham had been
+greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were in those days
+piling up in every country in Europe. He had gone to Essen, and at Essen
+he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great guns that
+were presently to smash the effete British fleet and open the Imperial
+way to London.
+
+"I could not sleep," he wrote, "on account of this man and his talk and
+the streak of hatred in his talk. He distressed me not because he seemed
+exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary. I realized that he was more
+human than I was, and that only killing and killing could come out of
+such humanity. I thought of the great ugly guns I had seen, and of the
+still greater guns he had talked about, and how gloatingly he thought
+of the destruction they could do. I felt as I used to feel about that
+infernal stallion that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a
+despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in life. And this creature
+who had so disturbed me was only a beastly snuffy little man in an
+ill-fitting frock-coat, who laid his knife and fork by their tips on the
+edge of his plate, and picked his teeth with gusto and breathed into
+my face as he talked to me. The commonest of representative men. I went
+about that Westphalian country after that, with the conviction that
+headless, soulless, blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all
+about me. I felt that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest
+of black dragons. They were crouching here and away there in France and
+England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed
+up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks are
+hooded.... And I had never thought very much about them before, and
+there they were, waiting until some human fool like that frock-coated
+thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million, saw fit
+to call them out to action. Just out of hatred and nationalism and
+faction...."
+
+Then came a queer fancy.
+
+"Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see it
+more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for the
+happiness of life. It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous
+plot of the rebel metals against sensation. That is why in particular
+half-living people seem to love these things. La Ferriere was a fastness
+of the kind of tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny
+of the strong man over men. Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of
+the strong machine....
+
+"Science is either slave or master. These people--I mean the German
+people and militarist people generally--have no real mastery over the
+scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride. The monster
+of steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive. It
+has persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they must follow the
+logic of its path. Whither?... Only kingship will ever master that beast
+of steel which has got loose into the world. Nothing but the sense of
+unconquerable kingship in us all will ever dare withstand it.... Men
+must be kingly aristocrats--it isn't MAY be now, it is MUST be--or,
+these confederated metals, these things of chemistry and metallurgy,
+these explosives and mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of
+our race into mere red-streaked froth and filth...."
+
+Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast's release. Would
+it ever be given blood?
+
+"Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great war
+that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is with
+a note of incredulity that one tells oneself, 'After all this war may
+happen. But can it happen?'"
+
+He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war would
+ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident to White
+that he wanted very much to persuade himself against that idea. It was
+too disagreeable for him to think it probable. The paper was dated 1910.
+It was in October, 1914, that White, who was still working upon the
+laborious uncertain account of Benham's life and thought he has recently
+published, read what Benham had written. Benham concluded that the
+common-sense of the world would hold up this danger until reason could
+get "to the head of things."
+
+"There are already mighty forces in Germany," Benham wrote, "that will
+struggle very powerfully to avoid a war. And these forces increase.
+Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama and the
+display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble people.... I
+have talked with Germans of the better kind.... You cannot have a whole
+nation of Christophes.... There also the true knighthood discovers
+itself.... I do not believe this war will overtake us."
+
+"WELL!" said White.
+
+"I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better," the notes
+went on.
+
+But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve. Other
+things were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was too
+late for them....
+
+"It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over
+Europe, because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the blood of
+a people, because a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled.... Does
+no one see what that metallic beast will do if they once let it loose?
+It will trample cities; it will devour nations...."
+
+White read this on the 9th of October, 1914. One crumpled evening
+paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: "Rain of Incendiary
+Shells. Antwerp Ablaze." Another declared untruthfully but impressively:
+"Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City."
+
+He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and
+turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no
+data at all--as every one did at that time--before he was able to go on
+with Benham's manuscripts.
+
+These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like
+finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between the
+pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a
+heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill....
+
+"How can we ever begin over again?" said White, and sat for a long time
+staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too
+that men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to
+succeed them....
+
+"We have to begin over again," said White at last, and took up Benham's
+papers where he had laid them down....
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth Limitation
+was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position. This
+section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the
+psychology of economic organization....
+
+It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important part
+played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of
+human affairs. This was a very natural result of his peculiar social
+circumstances. Most people born to wealth and ease take the established
+industrial system as the natural method in human affairs; it is only
+very reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and disinterestedness
+that they can be brought to realize that it is natural only in the sense
+that it has grown up and come about, and necessary only because nobody
+is strong and clever enough to rearrange it. Their experience of it is
+a satisfactory experience. On the other hand, the better off one is, the
+wider is one's outlook and the more alert one is to see the risks and
+dangers of international dissensions. Travel and talk to foreigners open
+one's eyes to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become
+conceivable. It is in the nature of things that socialists and labour
+parties should minimize international obligations and necessities, and
+equally so that autocracies and aristocracies and plutocracies should be
+negligent of and impatient about social reform.
+
+But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker and
+director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful humanity and
+enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned opportunity. It is a far
+profounder and subtler conflict than any other in human affairs. "I can
+foresee a time," he wrote, "when the greater national and racial hatreds
+may all be so weakened as to be no longer a considerable source of human
+limitation and misery, when the suspicions of complexion and language
+and social habit are allayed, and when the element of hatred and
+aggression may be clean washed out of most religious cults, but I do not
+begin to imagine a time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there
+will not be great friction between those who employ, those who direct
+collective action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in
+industrialism. This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due
+very largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort of
+organization. Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass and
+self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so deeply
+seated, so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be cheerfully
+obedient and modestly directive in war time, there is no reason why
+ultimately they should not be so in the business of peace. But I do not
+understand the elements of the methods by which this state of affairs
+can be brought about.
+
+"If I were to confess this much to an intelligent working man I know
+that at once he would answer 'Socialism,' but Socialism is no more a
+solution of this problem than eating is a solution when one is lost in
+the wilderness and hungry. Of course everybody with any intelligence
+wants Socialism, everybody, that is to say, wants to see all human
+efforts directed to the common good and a common end, but brought face
+to face with practical problems Socialism betrays a vast insufficiency
+of practical suggestions. I do not say that Socialism would not work,
+but I do say that so far Socialists have failed to convince me that
+they could work it. The substitution of a stupid official for a greedy
+proprietor may mean a vanished dividend, a limited output and no
+other human advantage whatever. Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent
+gesture, inspiring, encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not very
+helpful, towards the vast problem of moral and material adjustment
+before the race. That problem is incurably miscellaneous and intricate,
+and only by great multitudes of generous workers, one working at this
+point and one at that, secretly devoted knights of humanity, hidden
+and dispersed kings, unaware of one another, doubting each his right
+to count himself among those who do these kingly services, is this
+elaborate rightening of work and guidance to be done."
+
+So from these most fundamental social difficulties he came back to his
+panacea. All paths and all enquiries led him back to his conception of
+aristocracy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted, self-examining yet
+secret, making no personal nor class pretences, as the supreme need not
+only of the individual but the world.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal which had brought the two
+schoolfellows together again. White had been on his way to Zimbabwe.
+An emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had driven him to seek
+consolations in strange scenery and mysterious desolations. It was as if
+Zimbabwe called to him. Benham had come to South Africa to see into the
+question of Indian immigration, and he was now on his way to meet Amanda
+in London. Neither man had given much heed to the gathering social
+conflict on the Rand until the storm burst about them. There had been
+a few paragraphs in the papers about a dispute upon a point of labour
+etiquette, a question of the recognition of Trade Union officials, a
+thing that impressed them both as technical, and then suddenly a long
+incubated quarrel flared out in rioting and violence, the burning of
+houses and furniture, attacks on mines, attempts to dynamite trains.
+White stayed in Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded up
+country by the railway strike that was among the possibilities of
+the situation. Benham stayed because he was going to London very
+reluctantly, and he was glad of this justification for a few days'
+delay. The two men found themselves occupying adjacent tables in the
+Sherborough Hotel, and White was the first to recognize the other. They
+came together with a warmth and readiness of intimacy that neither would
+have displayed in London.
+
+White had not seen Benham since the social days of Amanda at Lancaster
+Gate, and he was astonished at the change a few years had made in him.
+The peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair had become more
+marked, his skin was deader, his features seemed more prominent and his
+expression intenser. His eyes were very bright and more sunken under his
+brows. He had suffered from yellow fever in the West Indies, and these
+it seemed were the marks left by that illness. And he was much more
+detached from the people about him; less attentive to the small
+incidents of life, more occupied with inner things. He greeted White
+with a confidence that White was one day to remember as pathetic.
+
+"It is good to meet an old friend," Benham said. "I have lost friends.
+And I do not make fresh ones. I go about too much by myself, and I do
+not follow the same tracks that other people are following...."
+
+What track was he following? It was now that White first heard of the
+Research Magnificent. He wanted to know what Benham was doing, and
+Benham after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his interest
+in insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions. "It is, of
+course, a part of something else," he amplified. He was writing a book,
+"an enormous sort of book." He laughed with a touch of shyness. It
+was about "everything," about how to live and how not to live. And
+"aristocracy, and all sorts of things." White was always curious about
+other people's books. Benham became earnest and more explicit under
+encouragement, and to talk about his book was soon to talk about
+himself. In various ways, intentionally and inadvertently, he told White
+much. These chance encounters, these intimacies of the train and hotel,
+will lead men at times to a stark frankness of statement they would
+never permit themselves with habitual friends.
+
+About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little,
+considering how insistent it was becoming. But the wide propositions
+of the Research Magnificent, with its large indifference to immediate
+occurrences, its vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted
+very sharply in White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and
+resentment of the events about them. For him the thought of that first
+discussion of this vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was
+flowering, and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a
+fringe of vivid little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying
+on bicycles and afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring
+centres of disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, of the
+muffled galloping of troops through the broad dusty street in the night,
+of groups of men standing and watching down straight broad roads, roads
+that ended in groups of chimneys and squat buildings of corrugated iron.
+And once there was a marching body of white men in the foreground and a
+complicated wire fence, and a clustering mass of Kaffirs watching them
+over this fence and talking eagerly amongst themselves.
+
+"All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,"
+said Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation....
+
+But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt that
+it was more than that. Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that
+eventful background while Benham talked to him.
+
+When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the
+background the greater share of his attention....
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that the
+full values came to very many things that Benham said during these last
+conversations. The papers fitted in with his memories of their long
+talks like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk had repeated
+the private writings in which he had first digested his ideas that it
+was presently almost impossible to disentangle what had been said and
+understood at Johannesburg from the fuller statement of those patched
+and corrected manuscripts. The two things merged in White's mind as he
+read. The written text took upon itself a resonance of Benham's
+voice; it eked out the hints and broken sentences of his remembered
+conversation.
+
+But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their
+mere marked absence an impression on White's mind. And occasionally
+after Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an
+occasional aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men who
+restrain themselves from betraying a preoccupation. He would say nothing
+about Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant to speak of
+Prothero, and another peculiarity was that he referred perhaps half a
+dozen times or more to the idea that he was a "prig." He seemed to be
+defending himself against some inner accusation, some unconquerable
+doubt of the entire adventure of his life. These half hints and hints by
+omission exercised the quick intuitions of White's mind very keenly, and
+he drew far closer to an understanding of Benham's reserves than Benham
+ever suspected....
+
+At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
+completely justified in his treatment of her. She had betrayed him and
+he had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control. He had no doubt
+that he had punished her very effectively, and it was only after he had
+been travelling in China with Prothero for some time and in the light
+of one or two chance phrases in her letters that he began to have doubts
+whether he ought to have punished her at all. And one night at Shanghai
+he had a dream in which she stood before him, dishevelled and tearful,
+his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was dirty
+and shameful and spoilt for ever, because he had gone away from her.
+Afterwards the dream became absurd: she showed him the black leopard's
+fur as though it was a rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the
+leopard skin that had been so bright and wonderful such a little time
+ago, and he awoke before he could answer her, and for a long time he
+was full of unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate
+unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd. She had spoilt her
+own fur. But what was more penetrating and distressing in this dream was
+not so much the case Amanda stated as the atmosphere of unconquerable
+intimacy between them, as though they still belonged to each other,
+soul to soul, as though nothing that had happened afterwards could have
+destroyed their common responsibility and the common interest of their
+first unstinted union. She was hurt, and of course he was hurt. He began
+to see that his marriage to Amanda was still infinitely more than a
+technical bond.
+
+And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether she
+realized anything of the sort. Her letters fluctuated very much in tone,
+but at times they were as detached and guarded as a schoolgirl writing
+to a cousin. Then it seemed to Benham an extraordinary fraud on her
+part that she should presume to come into his dream with an entirely
+deceptive closeness and confidence. She began to sound him in these
+latter letters upon the possibility of divorce. This, which he had been
+quite disposed to concede in London, now struck him as an outrageous
+suggestion. He wrote to ask her why, and she responded exasperatingly
+that she thought it was "better." But, again, why better? It is
+remarkable that although his mind had habituated itself to the idea that
+Easton was her lover in London, her thought of being divorced, no doubt
+to marry again, filled him with jealous rage. She asked him to take
+the blame in the divorce proceedings. There, again, he found himself
+ungenerous. He did not want to do that. Why should he do that? As a
+matter of fact he was by no means reconciled to the price he had paid
+for his Research Magnificent; he regretted his Amanda acutely. He was
+regretting her with a regret that grew when by all the rules of life it
+ought to be diminishing.
+
+It was in consequence of that regret and his controversies with Prothero
+while they travelled together in China that his concern about what he
+called priggishness arose. It is a concern that one may suppose has a
+little afflicted every reasonably self-conscious man who has turned from
+the natural passionate personal life to religion or to public service
+or any abstract devotion. These things that are at least more extensive
+than the interests of flesh and blood have a trick of becoming
+unsubstantial, they shine gloriously and inspiringly upon the
+imagination, they capture one and isolate one and then they vanish out
+of sight. It is far easier to be entirely faithful to friend or lover
+than it is to be faithful to a cause or to one's country or to a
+religion. In the glow of one's first service that larger idea may be as
+closely spontaneous as a handclasp, but in the darkness that comes as
+the glow dies away there is a fearful sense of unreality. It was in such
+dark moments that Benham was most persecuted by his memories of Amanda
+and most distressed by this suspicion that the Research Magnificent was
+a priggishness, a pretentious logomachy. Prothero could indeed hint as
+much so skilfully that at times the dream of nobility seemed an insult
+to the sunshine, to the careless laughter of children, to the good light
+in wine and all the warm happiness of existence. And then Amanda would
+peep out of the dusk and whisper, "Of course if you could leave me--!
+Was I not LIFE? Even now if you cared to come back to me-- For I loved
+you best and loved you still, old Cheetah, long after you had left me to
+follow your dreams.... Even now I am drifting further into lies and the
+last shreds of dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful
+leopard I am now, who was once clean and bright.... You could come back,
+Cheetah, and you could save me yet. If you would love me...."
+
+In certain moods she could wring his heart by such imagined speeches,
+the very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that his ear had
+loved, and not only could she distress him, but when Benham was in this
+heartache mood, when once she had set him going, then his little mother
+also would rise against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue eyes
+bright with tears; and his frowsty father would back towards him and
+sit down complaining that he was neglected, and even little Mrs.
+Skelmersdale would reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking after
+him as he slunk away from her through Kensington Gardens; indeed every
+personal link he had ever had to life could in certain moods pull him
+back through the door of self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching
+and accusing himself of harshness and self-concentration. The very
+kittens of his childhood revived forgotten moments of long-repented
+hardness. For a year before Prothero was killed there were these
+heartaches. That tragedy gave them their crowning justification. All
+these people said in this form or that, "You owed a debt to us, you
+evaded it, you betrayed us, you owed us life out of yourself, love and
+services, and you have gone off from us all with this life that was
+ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of the world,
+and with empty phantoms of power and destiny. All this was
+intellectualization. You sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind.
+There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like you
+may lay hold upon. The rule of the world is a fortuitous result of
+incalculably multitudinous forces. But all of us you could have made
+happier. You could have spared us distresses. Prothero died because of
+you. Presently it will be the turn of your father, your mother--Amanda
+perhaps...."
+
+He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several memoranda
+about priggishness that White read and came near to understanding. In
+spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was making up his mind
+to be a prig. He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness
+against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate
+sympathy for Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and
+he made his choice. But it was a reluctant choice.
+
+One fragment began in the air. "Of course I had made myself responsible
+for her life. But it was, you see, such a confoundedly energetic life,
+as vigorous and as slippery as an eel.... Only by giving all my strength
+to her could I have held Amanda.... So what was the good of trying to
+hold Amanda?...
+
+"All one's people have this sort of claim upon one. Claims made by their
+pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and dependences.
+You've no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom when
+it means snapping and tearing the silly suffering tendrils they have
+wrapped about you. The true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp,
+enough steadiness, to be kind and right to every human being and still
+do the work that ought to be his essential life. I see that now.
+It's one of the things this last year or so of loneliness has made me
+realize; that in so far as I have set out to live the aristocratic life
+I have failed. Instead I've discovered it--and found myself out. I'm an
+overstrung man. I go harshly and continuously for one idea. I live as I
+ride. I blunder through my fences, I take off too soon. I've no natural
+ease of mind or conduct or body. I am straining to keep hold of a thing
+too big for me and do a thing beyond my ability. Only after Prothero's
+death was it possible for me to realize the prig I have always been,
+first as regards him and then as regards Amanda and my mother and every
+one. A necessary unavoidable priggishness...." I do not see how
+certain things can be done without prigs, people, that is to say, so
+concentrated and specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so
+resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced.... All things must begin
+with clumsiness, there is no assurance about pioneers....
+
+"Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain
+aristocracy.... But the very essence of aristocracy, as I conceive it,
+is that it does not explain nor talk about itself....
+
+"After all it doesn't matter what I am.... It's just a private vexation
+that I haven't got where I meant to get. That does not affect the truth
+I have to tell....
+
+"If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one must
+speak the truth. I have worked out some very considerable things in my
+research, and the time has come when I must set them out clearly and
+plainly. That is my job anyhow. My journey to London to release Amanda
+will be just the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my real
+life. It will release me from my last entanglement with the fellow
+creatures I have always failed to make happy.... It's a detail in the
+work.... And I shall go on.
+
+"But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical
+operation.
+
+"It's very like that. A surgical operation, and when it is over perhaps
+I shall think no more about it.
+
+"And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done. So
+far I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of living. I
+must begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can upon the details,
+and, presently, I shall see more clearly where other men are working to
+the same ends...."
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+Benham's expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle
+between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble life to
+the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and sympathy for
+the earthliness of that inglorious little don. Although Benham insisted
+upon the dominance of life by noble imaginations and relentless
+reasonableness, he would never altogether abandon the materialism of
+life. Prothero had once said to him, "You are the advocate of the brain
+and I of the belly. Only, only we respect each other." And at another
+time, "You fear emotions and distrust sensations. I invite them. You do
+not drink gin because you think it would make you weep. But if I could
+not weep in any other way I would drink gin." And it was under
+the influence of Prothero that Benham turned from the haughty
+intellectualism, the systematized superiorities and refinements, the
+caste marks and defensive dignities of India to China, that great
+teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow humanity.
+
+Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout of elevated idealism.
+It was only very slowly that he reconciled his mind to the idea of an
+entirely solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream. For some time as
+he went about the world he was trying to bring himself into relationship
+with the advanced thinkers, the liberal-minded people who seemed to
+promise at least a mental and moral co-operation. Yet it is difficult to
+see what co-operation was possible unless it was some sort of agreement
+that presently they should all shout together. And it was after a
+certain pursuit of Rabindranath Tagore, whom he met in Hampstead, that a
+horror of perfect manners and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled
+from that starry calm to the rich uncleanness of the most undignified
+fellow of Trinity. And as an advocate and exponent of the richness of
+the lower levels of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of
+the uttermost refinements of pride, Prothero went with Benham by way of
+Siberia to the Chinese scene.
+
+Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner-table in their
+choice of food and drink. Benham was always wary and Prothero always
+appreciative. It peeped out in the distribution of their time, in the
+direction of their glances. Whenever women walked about, Prothero gave
+way to a sort of ethnological excitement. "That girl--a wonderful racial
+type." But in Moscow he was sentimental. He insisted on going again to
+the Cosmopolis Bazaar, and when he had ascertained that Anna Alexievna
+had vanished and left no trace he prowled the streets until the small
+hours.
+
+In the eastward train he talked intermittently of her. "I should have
+defied Cambridge," he said.
+
+But at every stopping station he got out upon the platform
+ethnologically alert....
+
+Theoretically Benham was disgusted with Prothero. Really he was not
+disgusted at all. There was something about Prothero like a sparrow,
+like a starling, like a Scotch terrier.... These, too, are morally
+objectionable creatures that do not disgust....
+
+Prothero discoursed much upon the essential goodness of Russians. He
+said they were a people of genius, that they showed it in their faults
+and failures just as much as in their virtues and achievements. He
+extolled the "germinating disorder" of Moscow far above the "implacable
+discipline" of Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a base
+materialist people, could so maintain its attention upon precision and
+cleanliness. Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. "But all
+exaltation neglects," said Prothero. "No religion has ever boasted that
+its saints were spick and span." This controversy raged between them in
+the streets of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked their way
+through the indescribable filth of Pekin.
+
+"You say that all this is a fine disdain for material things," said
+Benham. "But look out there!"
+
+Apt to their argument a couple of sturdy young women came shuffling
+along, cleaving the crowd in the narrow street by virtue of a single
+word and two brace of pails of human ordure.
+
+"That is not a fine disdain for material things," said Benham. "That is
+merely individualism and unsystematic living."
+
+"A mere phase of frankness. Only frankness is left to them now. The
+Manchus crippled them, spoilt their roads and broke their waterways.
+European intervention paralyses every attempt they make to establish
+order on their own lines. In the Ming days China did not reek.... And,
+anyhow, Benham, it's better than the silly waste of London...."
+
+And in a little while Prothero discovered that China had tried Benham
+and found him wanting, centuries and dynasties ago.
+
+What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he asked, but the ideal of
+Confucius, the superior person, "the son of the King"? There you had the
+very essence of Benham, the idea of self-examination, self-preparation
+under a vague Theocracy. ("Vaguer," said Benham, "for the Confucian
+Heaven could punish and reward.") Even the elaborate sham modesty of the
+two dreams was the same. Benham interrupted and protested with heat. And
+this Confucian idea of the son of the King, Prothero insisted, had been
+the cause of China's paralysis. "My idea of nobility is not traditional
+but expectant," said Benham. "After all, Confucianism has held together
+a great pacific state far longer than any other polity has ever lasted.
+I'll accept your Confucianism. I've not the slightest objection to
+finding China nearer salvation than any other land. Do but turn it round
+so that it looks to the future and not to the past, and it will be the
+best social and political culture in the world. That, indeed, is what
+is happening. Mix Chinese culture with American enterprise and you will
+have made a new lead for mankind."
+
+From that Benham drove on to discoveries. "When a man thinks of the past
+he concentrates on self; when he thinks of the future he radiates from
+self. Call me a neo-Confucian; with the cone opening forward away from
+me, instead of focussing on me...."
+
+"You make me think of an extinguisher," said Prothero.
+
+"You know I am thinking of a focus," said Benham. "But all your thought
+now has become caricature.... You have stopped thinking. You are
+fighting after making up your mind...."
+
+Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham's prompt endorsement of his
+Chinese identification. He had hoped it would be exasperating. He tried
+to barb his offence. He amplified the indictment. All cultures must
+be judged by their reaction and fatigue products, and Confucianism had
+produced formalism, priggishness, humbug.... No doubt its ideals had had
+their successes; they had unified China, stamped the idea of universal
+peace and good manners upon the greatest mass of population in the
+world, paved the way for much beautiful art and literature and living.
+"But in the end, all your stern orderliness, Benham," said Prothero,
+"only leads to me. The human spirit rebels against this everlasting
+armour on the soul. After Han came T'ang. Have you never read Ling Po?
+There's scraps of him in English in that little book you have--what is
+it?--the LUTE OF JADE? He was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam
+after the Prophet. Life must relax at last...."
+
+"No!" cried Benham. "If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it is
+creative, no...."
+
+Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven to
+closer enquiries into Chinese thought. He tried particularly to get to
+mental grips with English-speaking Chinese. "We still know nothing of
+China," said Prothero. "Most of the stuff we have been told about this
+country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle. We send merchants from
+Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what doesn't remind them of
+these delectable standards seems either funny to them or wicked. I admit
+the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to speak, in the ancient characters
+and the ancient traditions, but for all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what
+all the rest of the world has still to find and get. When they begin to
+speak and write in a modern way and handle modern things and break into
+the soil they have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find
+just how much it is behind.... Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not
+such fools as that, but LIFE...."
+
+Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.
+
+He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
+wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
+foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities, delirious
+religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with loaded
+guns, China, even more than America, develops steadily into a massive
+possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism....
+
+The two men followed their associated and disconnected paths. Through
+Benham's chance speeches and notes, White caught glimpses, as one might
+catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that bilateral adventure. He
+saw Benham in conversation with liberal-minded mandarins, grave-faced,
+bald-browed persons with disciplined movements, who sat with their hands
+thrust into their sleeves talking excellent English; while Prothero
+pursued enquiries of an intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of
+a more confidential type. And, presently, Prothero began to discover and
+discuss the merits of opium.
+
+For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, if one is to
+find the solution of life's problem in the rational enjoyment of one's
+sensations, why should one not use opium? It is art materialized.
+It gives tremendous experiences with a minimum of exertion, and if
+presently its gifts diminish one need but increase the quantity.
+Moreover, it quickens the garrulous mind, and steadies the happiness of
+love. Across the varied adventures of Benham's journey in China fell the
+shadow first of a suspicion and then of a certainty....
+
+The perfected and ancient vices of China wrapped about Prothero like
+some tainted but scented robe, and all too late Benham sought to drag
+him away. And then in a passion of disgust turned from him.
+
+"To this," cried Benham, "one comes! Save for pride and fierceness!"
+
+"Better this than cruelty," said Prothero talking quickly and clearly
+because of the evil thing in his veins. "You think that you are the only
+explorer of life, Benham, but while you toil up the mountains I board
+the house-boat and float down the stream. For you the stars, for me the
+music and the lanterns. You are the son of a mountaineering don, and I
+am a Chinese philosopher of the riper school. You force yourself beyond
+fear of pain, and I force myself beyond fear of consequences. What
+are we either of us but children groping under the black cloak of our
+Maker?--who will not blind us with his light. Did he not give us also
+these lusts, the keen knife and the sweetness, these sensations that are
+like pineapple smeared with saltpetre, like salted olives from heaven,
+like being flayed with delight.... And did he not give us dreams
+fantastic beyond any lust whatever? What is the good of talking? Speak
+to your own kind. I have gone, Benham. I am lost already. There is
+no resisting any more, since I have drugged away resistance. Why then
+should I come back? I know now the symphonies of the exalted nerves; I
+can judge; and I say better lie and hear them to the end than come back
+again to my old life, to my little tin-whistle solo, my--effort! My
+EFFORT!... I ruin my body. I know. But what of that?... I shall soon be
+thin and filthy. What of the grape-skin when one has had the pulp?"
+
+"But," said Benham, "the cleanness of life!"
+
+"While I perish," said Prothero still more wickedly, "I say good
+things...."
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+White had a vision of a great city with narrow crowded streets, hung
+with lank banners and gay with vertical vermilion labels, and of a
+pleasant large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, a garden
+set with artificial stones and with beasts and men and lanterns of white
+porcelain, a garden which overlooked this city. Here it was that Benham
+stayed and talked with his host, a man robed in marvellous silks and
+subtle of speech even in the European languages he used, and meanwhile
+Prothero, it seemed, had gone down into the wickedness of the town
+below. It was a very great town indeed, spreading for miles along the
+banks of a huge river, a river that divided itself indolently into three
+shining branches so as to make islands of the central portion of the
+place. And on this river swarmed for ever a vast flotilla of ships and
+boats, boats in which people lived, boats in which they sought pleasure,
+moored places of assembly, high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger
+sampans, cargo craft, such a water town in streets and lanes, endless
+miles of it, as no other part of the world save China can display. In
+the daylight it was gay with countless sunlit colours embroidered upon
+a fabric of yellow and brown, at night it glittered with a hundred
+thousand lights that swayed and quivered and were reflected quiveringly
+upon the black flowing waters.
+
+And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger who
+was for some reason very vividly realized by White's imagination. He was
+a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken cheeks that made his cheek
+bones very prominent, and gave his thin-lipped mouth something of the
+geniality of a skull, and the arm he thrust out of his yellow robe to
+hand Prothero's message to Benham was lean as a pole. So he stood out in
+White's imagination, against the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs
+and blue haze of the great town below, and was with one exception the
+distinctest thing in the story. The message he bore was scribbled by
+Prothero himself in a nerveless scrawl: "Send a hundred dollars by this
+man. I am in a frightful fix."
+
+Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage of
+opium, and something in this message stirred his facile indignation.
+Twice before he had had similar demands. And on the whole they had
+seemed to him to be unreasonable demands. He was astonished that while
+he was sitting and talking of the great world-republic of the future and
+the secret self-directed aristocracy that would make it possible,
+his own friend, his chosen companion, should thus, by this inglorious
+request and this ungainly messenger, disavow him. He felt a wave of
+intense irritation.
+
+"No," he said, "I will not."
+
+And he was too angry to express himself in any language understandable
+by his messenger.
+
+His host intervened and explained after a few questions that the
+occasion was serious. Prothero, it seemed, had been gambling.
+
+"No," said Benham. "He is shameless. Let him do what he can."
+
+The messenger was still reluctant to go.
+
+And scarcely had he gone before misgivings seized Benham.
+
+"Where IS your friend?" asked the mandarin.
+
+"I don't know," said Benham.
+
+"But they will keep him! They may do all sorts of things when they find
+he is lying to them."
+
+"Lying to them?"
+
+"About your help."
+
+"Stop that man," cried Benham suddenly realizing his mistake. But
+when the servants went to stop the messenger their intentions were
+misunderstood, and the man dashed through the open gate of the garden
+and made off down the winding road.
+
+"Stop him!" cried Benham, and started in pursuit, suddenly afraid for
+Prothero.
+
+The Chinese are a people of great curiosity, and a small pebble
+sometimes starts an avalanche....
+
+White pieced together his conception of the circles of disturbance that
+spread out from Benham's pursuit of Prothero's flying messenger.
+
+For weeks and months the great town had been uneasy in all its ways
+because of the insurgent spirits from the south and the disorder from
+the north, because of endless rumours and incessant intrigue. The stupid
+manoeuvres of one European "power" against another, the tactlessness of
+missionaries, the growing Chinese disposition to meet violence and force
+with violence and force, had fermented and brewed the possibility of an
+outbreak. The sudden resolve of Benham to get at once to Prothero was
+like the firing of a mine. This tall, pale-faced, incomprehensible
+stranger charging through the narrow streets that led to the
+pleasure-boats in the south river seemed to many a blue-clad citizen
+like the White Peril embodied. Behind him came the attendants of
+the rich man up the hill; but they surely were traitors to help this
+stranger.
+
+Before Benham could at all realize what was happening he found his way
+to the river-boat on which he supposed Prothero to be detained, barred
+by a vigorous street fight. Explanations were impossible; he joined in
+the fight.
+
+For three days that fight developed round the mystery of Prothero's
+disappearance.
+
+It was a complicated struggle into which the local foreign traders
+on the river-front and a detachment of modern drilled troops from the
+up-river barracks were presently drawn. It was a struggle that was never
+clearly explained, and at the end of it they found Prothero's body flung
+out upon a waste place near a little temple on the river bank, stabbed
+while he was asleep....
+
+And from the broken fragments of description that Benham let fall, White
+had an impression of him hunting for all those three days through the
+strange places of a Chinese city, along narrow passages, over queer
+Venetian-like bridges, through the vast spaces of empty warehouses, in
+the incense-scented darkness of temple yards, along planks that passed
+to the dark hulls of secret barges, in quick-flying boats that slipped
+noiselessly among the larger craft, and sometimes he hunted alone,
+sometimes in company, sometimes black figures struggled in the darkness
+against dim-lit backgrounds and sometimes a swarm of shining yellow
+faces screamed and shouted through the torn paper windows.... And
+then at the end of this confused effect of struggle, this Chinese
+kinematograph film, one last picture jerked into place and stopped and
+stood still, a white wall in the sunshine come upon suddenly round a
+corner, a dirty flagged passage and a stiff crumpled body that had for
+the first time an inexpressive face....
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+Benham sat at a table in the smoking-room of the Sherborough Hotel
+at Johannesburg and told of these things. White watched him from an
+armchair. And as he listened he noted again the intensification of
+Benham's face, the darkness under his brows, the pallor of his skin, the
+touch of red in his eyes. For there was still that red gleam in Benham's
+eyes; it shone when he looked out of a darkness into a light. And he
+sat forward with his arms folded under him, or moved his long lean hand
+about over the things on the table.
+
+"You see," he said, "this is a sort of horror in my mind. Things like
+this stick in my mind. I am always seeing Prothero now, and it will take
+years to get this scar off my memory again. Once before--about a horse,
+I had the same kind of distress. And it makes me tender, sore-minded
+about everything. It will go, of course, in the long run, and it's just
+like any other ache that lays hold of one. One can't cure it. One has to
+get along with it....
+
+"I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, but how was I to know
+then that it was so imperative to send that money?...
+
+"At the time it seemed just pandering to his vices....
+
+"I was angry. I shall never subdue that kind of hastiness altogether.
+It takes me by surprise. Before the messenger was out of sight I had
+repented....
+
+"I failed him. I have gone about in the world dreaming of tremendous
+things and failing most people. My wife too...."
+
+He stopped talking for a little time and folded his arms tight and
+stared hard in front of himself, his lips compressed.
+
+"You see, White," he said, with a kind of setting of the teeth, "this
+is the sort of thing one has to stand. Life is imperfect. Nothing can be
+done perfectly. And on the whole--" He spoke still more slowly, "I would
+go through again with the very same things that have hurt my people. If
+I had to live over again. I would try to do the things without hurting
+the people, but I would do the things anyhow. Because I'm raw with
+remorse, it does not follow that on the whole I am not doing right.
+Right doing isn't balm. If I could have contrived not to hurt these
+people as I have done, it would have been better, just as it would be
+better to win a battle without any killed or wounded. I was clumsy with
+them and they suffered, I suffer for their suffering, but still I have
+to stick to the way I have taken. One's blunders are accidents. If
+one thing is clearer than another it is that the world isn't
+accident-proof....
+
+"But I wish I had sent those dollars to Prothero.... God! White, but
+I lie awake at night thinking of that messenger as he turned away....
+Trying to stop him....
+
+"I didn't send those dollars. So fifty or sixty people were killed
+and many wounded.... There for all practical purposes the thing ends.
+Perhaps it will serve to give me a little charity for some other fool's
+haste and blundering....
+
+"I couldn't help it, White. I couldn't help it....
+
+"The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes on. One thinks, one learns,
+one adds one's contribution of experience and understanding. The spirit
+of the race goes on to light and comprehension. In spite of accidents.
+In spite of individual blundering.
+
+"It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that nobility is so easy as to
+come slick and true on every occasion....
+
+"If one gives oneself to any long aim one must reckon with minor
+disasters. This Research I undertook grows and grows. I believe in it
+more and more. The more it asks from me the more I give to it. When I
+was a youngster I thought the thing I wanted was just round the corner.
+I fancied I would find out the noble life in a year or two, just what
+it was, just where it took one, and for the rest of my life I would live
+it. Finely. But I am just one of a multitude of men, each one going a
+little wrong, each one achieving a little right. And the noble life is
+a long, long way ahead.... We are working out a new way of living for
+mankind, a new rule, a new conscience. It's no small job for all of us.
+There must be lifetimes of building up and lifetimes of pulling down and
+trying again. Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy....
+I see myself now for the little workman I am upon this tremendous
+undertaking. And all my life hereafter goes to serve it...."
+
+He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend. He spoke with a grim
+enthusiasm. "I'm a prig. I'm a fanatic, White. But I have something
+clear, something better worth going on with than any adventure of
+personal relationship could possibly be...."
+
+And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the faith
+that had grown up in his mind. He spoke with a touch of defiance, with
+the tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame. "I will
+tell you what I believe."
+
+He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow
+development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect
+until he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he refers
+his life to ends and purposes beyond himself. An aristocrat must be
+loyal. So it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must also be
+lucid; there it is that one has at once the demand for kingship and the
+repudiation of all existing states and kings. In this manner he had
+come to his idea of a great world republic that must replace the little
+warring kingdoms of the present, to the conception of an unseen kingship
+ruling the whole globe, to his King Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth
+and all sane loyalty. "There," he said, "is the link of our order, the
+new knighthood, the new aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth.
+There is our Prince. He is in me, he is in you; he is latent in all
+mankind. I have worked this out and tried it and lived it, and I know
+that outwardly and inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else be
+a poor thing and a base one. On great occasions and small occasions I
+have failed myself a thousand times, but no failure lasts if your faith
+lasts. What I have learnt, what I have thought out and made sure, I
+want now to tell the world. Somehow I will tell it, as a book I suppose,
+though I do not know if I shall ever be able to make a book. But I have
+away there in London or with me here all the masses of notes I have
+made in my search for the life that is worth while living.... We who are
+self-appointed aristocrats, who are not ashamed of kingship, must speak
+to one another....
+
+"We can have no organization because organizations corrupt....
+
+"No recognition....
+
+"But we can speak plainly...."
+
+(As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and voices
+of mounted police riding past the hotel.)
+
+"But on one side your aristocracy means revolution," said White. "It
+becomes a political conspiracy."
+
+"Manifestly. An open conspiracy. It denies the king upon the stamps and
+the flag upon the wall. It is the continual proclamation of the Republic
+of Mankind."
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+The earlier phases of violence in the Rand outbreak in 1913 were
+manifest rather in the outskirts of Johannesburg than at the centre.
+"Pulling out" was going on first at this mine and then that, there were
+riots in Benoni, attacks on strike breakers and the smashing up of
+a number of houses. It was not until July the 4th that, with the
+suppression of a public meeting in the market-place, Johannesburg itself
+became the storm centre.
+
+Benham and White were present at this marketplace affair, a confused
+crowded occasion, in which a little leaven of active men stirred through
+a large uncertain multitude of decently dressed onlookers. The whole
+big square was astir, a swaying crowd of men. A ramshackle platform
+improvised upon a trolley struggled through the swarming straw hats to a
+street corner, and there was some speaking. At first it seemed as though
+military men were using this platform, and then it was manifestly in
+possession of an excited knot of labour leaders with red rosettes. The
+military men had said their say and got down. They came close by Benham,
+pushing their way across the square. "We've warned them," said one. A
+red flag, like some misunderstood remark at a tea-party, was fitfully
+visible and incomprehensible behind the platform. Somebody was either
+pitched or fell off the platform. One could hear nothing from the
+speakers except a minute bleating....
+
+Then there were shouts that the police were charging. A number of
+mounted men trotted into the square. The crowd began a series of short
+rushes that opened lanes for the passage of the mounted police as they
+rode to and fro. These men trotted through the crowd, scattering knots
+of people. They carried pick-handles, but they did not seem to be
+hitting with them. It became clear that they aimed at the capture of
+the trolley. There was only a feeble struggle for the trolley; it was
+captured and hauled through the scattered spectators in the square
+to the protection of a small impassive body of regular cavalry at the
+opposite corner. Then quite a number of people seemed to be getting
+excited and fighting. They appeared to be vaguely fighting the
+foot-police, and the police seemed to be vaguely pushing through
+them and dispersing them. The roof of a little one-story shop became
+prominent as a centre of vigorous stone-throwing.
+
+It was no sort of battle. Merely the normal inconsecutiveness of human
+affairs had become exaggerated and pugnacious. A meeting was being
+prevented, and the police engaged in the operation were being pelted or
+obstructed. Mostly people were just looking on.
+
+"It amounts to nothing," said Benham. "Even if they held a meeting, what
+could happen? Why does the Government try to stop it?"
+
+The drifting and charging and a little booing went on for some time.
+Every now and then some one clambered to a point of vantage, began
+a speech and was pulled down by policemen. And at last across the
+confusion came an idea, like a wind across a pond.
+
+The strikers were to go to the Power Station.
+
+That had the effect of a distinct move in the game. The Power Station
+was the centre of Johannesburg's light and energy. There if anywhere it
+would be possible to express one's disapproval of the administration,
+one's desire to embarrass and confute it. One could stop all sorts of
+things from the Power Station. At any rate it was a repartee to the
+suppression of the meeting. Everybody seemed gladdened by a definite
+project.
+
+Benham and White went with the crowd.
+
+At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the
+scattered drift of people became congested. Gliding slowly across the
+mass came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with even its
+glass undamaged, and then another and another. Strikers, with the
+happy expression of men who have found something expressive to do, were
+escorting the trams off the street. They were being meticulously careful
+with them. Never was there less mob violence in a riot. They walked by
+the captured cars almost deferentially, like rough men honoured by a
+real lady's company. And when White and Benham reached the Power House
+the marvel grew. The rioters were already in possession and going freely
+over the whole place, and they had injured nothing. They had stopped
+the engines, but they had not even disabled them. Here too manifestly a
+majority of the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.
+
+"But this is the most civilized rioting," said Benham. "It isn't
+rioting; it's drifting. Just as things drifted in Moscow. Because nobody
+has the rudder....
+
+"What maddens me," he said, "is the democracy of the whole thing. White!
+I HATE this modern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was there ever
+an absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the
+men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the
+same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the
+conceit that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just
+a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an
+inkling of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all
+this squalor and evil temper.... What does all this struggle here amount
+to? On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the
+other; suspicion everywhere....
+
+"And you know, White, at bottom THEY ALL WANT TO BE DECENT!
+
+"If only they had light enough in their brains to show them how.
+It's such a plain job they have here too, a new city, the simplest
+industries, freedom from war, everything to make a good life for men,
+prosperity, glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in the air. And
+mismanagement, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, stupidity, poison
+it all. A squabble about working on a Saturday afternoon, a squabble
+embittered by this universal shadow of miner's phthisis that the masters
+were too incapable and too mean to prevent.
+
+"Oh, God!" cried Benham, "when will men be princes and take hold of
+life? When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own?... Look
+at this place! Look at this place!... The easy, accessible happiness!
+The manifest prosperity. The newness and the sunshine. And the silly
+bitterness, the rage, the mischief and miseries!..."
+
+And then: "It's not our quarrel...."
+
+"It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides.
+Life is one long struggle against the incidental. I can feel my anger
+gathering against the Government here in spite of my reason. I want to
+go and expostulate. I have a ridiculous idea that I ought to go off to
+Lord Gladstone or Botha and expostulate.... What good would it do?
+They move in the magic circles of their own limitations, an official, a
+politician--how would they put it?--'with many things to consider....'
+
+"It's my weakness to be drawn into quarrels. It's a thing I have to
+guard against....
+
+"What does it all amount to? It is like a fight between navvies in
+a tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star. It doesn't concern
+us.... Oh! it doesn't indeed concern us. It's a scuffle in the darkness,
+and our business, the business of all brains, the only permanent good
+work is to light up the world.... There will be mischief and hatred
+here and suppression and then forgetfulness, and then things will go on
+again, a little better or a little worse...."
+
+"I'm tired of this place, White, and of all such places. I'm tired of
+the shouting and running, the beating and shooting. I'm sick of all the
+confusions of life's experience, which tells only of one need amidst an
+endless multitude of distresses. I've seen my fill of wars and disputes
+and struggles. I see now how a man may grow weary at last of life and
+its disorders, its unreal exacting disorders, its blunders and its
+remorse. No! I want to begin upon the realities I have made for myself.
+For they are the realities. I want to go now to some quiet corner
+where I can polish what I have learnt, sort out my accumulations, be
+undisturbed by these transitory symptomatic things....
+
+"What was that boy saying? They are burning the STAR office.... Well,
+let them...."
+
+And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things
+that hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the
+sky and the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights down
+side streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the making of
+greatness and a new great spirit in men. All the rest of his life, he
+said, must be given to that. He would say his thing plainly and honestly
+and afterwards other men would say it clearly and beautifully; here it
+would touch a man and there it would touch a man; the Invisible King in
+us all would find himself and know himself a little in this and a little
+in that, and at last a day would come, when fair things and fine things
+would rule the world and such squalor as this about them would be as
+impossible any more for men as a Stone Age Corroboree....
+
+Late or soon?
+
+Benham sought for some loose large measure of time.
+
+"Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes....
+
+"Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred years
+or ten thousand years? It will never come in our lives, White. Not soon
+enough for that. But after that everything will be soon--when one comes
+to death then everything is at one's fingertips--I can feel that greater
+world I shall never see as one feels the dawn coming through the last
+darkness...."
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at lunch
+in the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the burning
+of the STAR office. The Sherborough dining-room was on the first floor,
+and the Venetian window beside their table opened on to a verandah
+above a piazza. As they talked they became aware of an excitement in the
+street below, shouting and running and then a sound of wheels and the
+tramp of a body of soldiers marching quickly. White stood up and looked.
+"They're seizing the stuff in the gunshops," he said, sitting down
+again. "It's amazing they haven't done it before."
+
+They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at
+Mukden that had won Benham's admiration....
+
+A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass
+smashing. Then more revolver shots. "That's at the big club at the
+corner, I think," said Benham and went out upon the verandah.
+
+Up and down the street mischief was afoot. Outside the Rand Club in
+the cross street a considerable mass of people had accumulated, and
+was being hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers. Down the street
+people were looking in the direction of the market-place and then
+suddenly a rush of figures flooded round the corner, first a froth
+of scattered individuals and then a mass, a column, marching with an
+appearance of order and waving a flag. It was a poorly disciplined body,
+it fringed out into a swarm of sympathizers and spectators upon the
+side walk, and at the head of it two men disputed. They seemed to be
+differing about the direction of the whole crowd. Suddenly one smote the
+other with his fist, a blow that hurled him sideways, and then turned
+with a triumphant gesture to the following ranks, waving his arms in
+the air. He was a tall lean man, hatless and collarless, greyhaired and
+wild-eyed. On he came, gesticulating gauntly, past the hotel.
+
+And then up the street something happened. Benham's attention was turned
+round to it by a checking, by a kind of catch in the breath, on the part
+of the advancing procession under the verandah.
+
+The roadway beyond the club had suddenly become clear. Across it a dozen
+soldiers had appeared and dismounted methodically and lined out, with
+their carbines in readiness. The mounted men at the club corner had
+vanished, and the people there had swayed about towards this new
+threat. Quite abruptly the miscellaneous noises of the crowd ceased.
+Understanding seized upon every one.
+
+These soldiers were going to fire....
+
+The brown uniformed figures moved like automata; the rifle shots rang
+out almost in one report....
+
+There was a rush in the crowd towards doorways and side streets, an
+enquiring pause, the darting back of a number of individuals into the
+roadway and then a derisive shouting. Nobody had been hit. The soldiers
+had fired in the air.
+
+"But this is a stupid game," said Benham. "Why did they fire at all?"
+
+The tall man who had led the mob had run out into the middle of the
+road. His commando was a little disposed to assume a marginal position,
+and it had to be reassured. He was near enough for Benham to see his
+face. For a time it looked anxious and thoughtful. Then he seemed to
+jump to his decision. He unbuttoned and opened his coat wide as if
+defying the soldiers. "Shoot," he bawled, "Shoot, if you dare!"
+
+A little uniform movement of the soldiers answered him. The small figure
+of the officer away there was inaudible. The coat of the man below
+flapped like the wings of a crowing cock before a breast of dirty shirt,
+the hoarse voice cracked with excitement, "Shoot, if you dare. Shoot, if
+you dare! See!"
+
+Came the metallic bang of the carbines again, and in the instant the
+leader collapsed in the road, a sprawl of clothes, hit by half a dozen
+bullets. It was an extraordinary effect. As though the figure had been
+deflated. It was incredible that a moment before this thing had been a
+man, an individual, a hesitating complicated purpose.
+
+"Good God!" cried Benham, "but--this is horrible!"
+
+The heap of garments lay still. The red hand that stretched out towards
+the soldiers never twitched.
+
+The spectacular silence broke into a confusion of sounds, women
+shrieked, men cursed, some fled, some sought a corner from which they
+might still see, others pressed forward. "Go for the swine!" bawled a
+voice, a third volley rattled over the heads of the people, and in
+the road below a man with a rifle halted, took aim, and answered the
+soldiers' fire. "Look out!" cried White who was watching the soldiers,
+and ducked. "This isn't in the air!"
+
+Came a straggling volley again, like a man running a metal hammer very
+rapidly along iron corrugations, and this time people were dropping all
+over the road. One white-faced man not a score of yards away fell with
+a curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for some yards with blood
+running abundantly from his neck, and fell and never stirred again.
+Another went down upon his back clumsily in the roadway and lay wringing
+his hands faster and faster until suddenly with a movement like a sigh
+they dropped inert by his side. A straw-hatted youth in a flannel suit
+ran and stopped and ran again. He seemed to be holding something red and
+strange to his face with both hands; above them his eyes were round
+and anxious. Blood came out between his fingers. He went right past
+the hotel and stumbled and suddenly sprawled headlong at the opposite
+corner. The majority of the crowd had already vanished into doorways and
+side streets. But there was still shouting and there was still a remnant
+of amazed and angry men in the roadway--and one or two angry women. They
+were not fighting. Indeed they were unarmed, but if they had had weapons
+now they would certainly have used them.
+
+"But this is preposterous!" cried Benham. "Preposterous. Those soldiers
+are never going to shoot again! This must stop."
+
+He stood hesitating for a moment and then turned about and dashed for
+the staircase. "Good Heaven!" cried White. "What are you going to do?"
+
+Benham was going to stop that conflict very much as a man might go to
+stop a clock that is striking unwarrantably and amazingly. He was going
+to stop it because it annoyed his sense of human dignity.
+
+White hesitated for a moment and then followed, crying "Benham!"
+
+But there was no arresting this last outbreak of Benham's all too
+impatient kingship. He pushed aside a ducking German waiter who was
+peeping through the glass doors, and rushed out of the hotel. With
+a gesture of authority he ran forward into the middle of the street,
+holding up his hand, in which he still held his dinner napkin clenched
+like a bomb. White believes firmly that Benham thought he would be able
+to dominate everything. He shouted out something about "Foolery!"
+
+Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sublime indifference to
+current things....
+
+But the carbines spoke again.
+
+Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against something invisible. He
+spun right round and fell down into a sitting position. He sat looking
+surprised.
+
+After one moment of blank funk White drew out his pocket handkerchief,
+held it arm high by way of a white flag, and ran out from the piazza of
+the hotel.
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+"Are you hit?" cried White dropping to his knees and making himself as
+compact as possible. "Benham!"
+
+Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought answered in a strange voice,
+a whisper into which a whistling note had been mixed.
+
+"It was stupid of me to come out here. Not my quarrel. Faults on both
+sides. And now I can't get up. I will sit here a moment and pull myself
+together. Perhaps I'm--I must be shot. But it seemed to come--inside
+me.... If I should be hurt. Am I hurt?... Will you see to that book of
+mine, White? It's odd. A kind of faintness.... What?"
+
+"I will see after your book," said White and glanced at his hand because
+it felt wet, and was astonished to discover it bright red. He forgot
+about himself then, and the fresh flight of bullets down the street.
+
+The immediate effect of this blood was that he said something more about
+the book, a promise, a definite promise. He could never recall his
+exact words, but their intention was binding. He conveyed his absolute
+acquiescence with Benham's wishes whatever they were. His life for that
+moment was unreservedly at his friend's disposal....
+
+White never knew if his promise was heard. Benham had stopped speaking
+quite abruptly with that "What?"
+
+He stared in front of him with a doubtful expression, like a man who is
+going to be sick, and then, in an instant, every muscle seemed to give
+way, he shuddered, his head flopped, and White held a dead man in his
+arms.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT ***
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
+#13 in our series by H. G. Wells
+
+Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
+copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
+this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
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+Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
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+**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
+
+**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971**
+
+*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!*****
+
+
+Title: The Research Magnificent
+
+Author: H. G. Wells
+
+Release Date: December, 1997 [EBook #1138]
+[This eBook was first posted on December 8, 1997]
+[This update was posted on January 25, 2004]
+[Note: it appears that our initial file was corrupted, perhaps
+in transfer. This file is a replacement for the original.]
+
+Edition: 10
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT ***
+
+
+
+
+This etext was prepared by Donald Lainson, <dlainson@sympatico.ca>
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+
+by H. G. Wells (1915)
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+THE PRELUDE
+
+      ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+
+
+THE STORY
+
+  I.  THE BOY GROWS UP
+
+ II.  THE YOUNG MAN ABOUT TOWN
+
+III.  AMANDA
+
+ IV.  THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON
+
+  V.  THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY
+
+ VI.  THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+
+
+
+THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT
+
+
+THE PRELUDE
+
+ON FEAR AND ARISTOCRACY
+
+
+1
+
+The story of William Porphyry Benham is the story of a man who was
+led into adventure by an idea.  It was an idea that took possession
+of his imagination quite early in life, it grew with him and changed
+with him, it interwove at last completely with his being.  His story
+is its story.  It was traceably germinating in the schoolboy; it was
+manifestly present in his mind at the very last moment of his
+adventurous life.  He belonged to that fortunate minority who are
+independent of daily necessities, so that he was free to go about
+the world under its direction.  It led him far.  It led him into
+situations that bordered upon the fantastic, it made him ridiculous,
+it came near to making him sublime.  And this idea of his was of
+such a nature that in several aspects he could document it.  Its
+logic forced him to introspection and to the making of a record.
+
+An idea that can play so large a part in a life must necessarily
+have something of the complication and protean quality of life
+itself.  It is not to be stated justly in any formula, it is not to
+be rendered by an epigram.  As well one might show a man's skeleton
+for his portrait.  Yet, essentially, Benham's idea was simple.  He
+had an incurable, an almost innate persuasion that he had to live
+life nobly and thoroughly.  His commoner expression for that
+thorough living is "the aristocratic life."  But by "aristocratic"
+he meant something very different from the quality of a Russian
+prince, let us say, or an English peer.  He meant an intensity, a
+clearness. . . .  Nobility for him was to get something out of his
+individual existence, a flame, a jewel, a splendour--it is a thing
+easier to understand than to say.
+
+One might hesitate to call this idea "innate," and yet it comes soon
+into a life when it comes at all.  In Benham's case we might trace
+it back to the Day Nursery at Seagate, we might detect it stirring
+already at the petticoat stage, in various private struttings and
+valiant dreamings with a helmet of pasteboard and a white-metal
+sword.  We have most of us been at least as far as that with Benham.
+And we have died like Horatius, slaying our thousands for our
+country, or we have perished at the stake or faced the levelled
+muskets of the firing party--"No, do not bandage my eyes"--because
+we would not betray the secret path that meant destruction to our
+city.  But with Benham the vein was stronger, and it increased
+instead of fading out as he grew to manhood.  It was less obscured
+by those earthy acquiescences, those discretions, that saving sense
+of proportion, which have made most of us so satisfactorily what we
+are.  "Porphyry," his mother had discovered before he was seventeen,
+"is an excellent boy, a brilliant boy, but, I begin to see, just a
+little unbalanced."
+
+The interest of him, the absurdity of him, the story of him, is
+that.
+
+Most of us are--balanced; in spite of occasional reveries we do come
+to terms with the limitations of life, with those desires and dreams
+and discretions that, to say the least of it, qualify our nobility,
+we take refuge in our sense of humour and congratulate ourselves on
+a certain amiable freedom from priggishness or presumption, but for
+Benham that easy declension to a humorous acceptance of life as it
+is did not occur.  He found his limitations soon enough; he was
+perpetually rediscovering them, but out of these interments of the
+spirit he rose again--remarkably.  When we others have decided that,
+to be plain about it, we are not going to lead the noble life at
+all, that the thing is too ambitious and expensive even to attempt,
+we have done so because there were other conceptions of existence
+that were good enough for us, we decided that instead of that
+glorious impossible being of ourselves, we would figure in our own
+eyes as jolly fellows, or sly dogs, or sane, sound, capable men or
+brilliant successes, and so forth--practicable things.  For Benham,
+exceptionally, there were not these practicable things.  He
+blundered, he fell short of himself, he had--as you will be told--
+some astonishing rebuffs, but they never turned him aside for long.
+He went by nature for this preposterous idea of nobility as a linnet
+hatched in a cage will try to fly.
+
+And when he discovered--and in this he was assisted not a little by
+his friend at his elbow--when he discovered that Nobility was not
+the simple thing he had at first supposed it to be, he set himself
+in a mood only slightly disconcerted to the discovery of Nobility.
+When it dawned upon him, as it did, that one cannot be noble, so to
+speak, IN VACUO, he set himself to discover a Noble Society.  He
+began with simple beliefs and fine attitudes and ended in a
+conscious research.  If he could not get through by a stride, then
+it followed that he must get through by a climb.  He spent the
+greater part of his life studying and experimenting in the noble
+possibilities of man.  He never lost his absurd faith in that
+conceivable splendour.  At first it was always just round the corner
+or just through the wood; to the last it seemed still but a little
+way beyond the distant mountains.
+
+For this reason this story has been called THE RESEARCH MAGNIFICENT.
+It was a real research, it was documented.  In the rooms in
+Westhaven Street that at last were as much as one could call his
+home, he had accumulated material for--one hesitates to call it a
+book--let us say it was an analysis of, a guide to the noble life.
+There after his tragic death came his old friend White, the
+journalist and novelist, under a promise, and found these papers; he
+found them to the extent of a crammed bureau, half a score of patent
+files quite distended and a writing-table drawer-full, and he was
+greatly exercised to find them.  They were, White declares, they are
+still after much experienced handling, an indigestible aggregation.
+On this point White is very assured.  When Benham thought he was
+gathering together a book he was dreaming, White says.  There is no
+book in it. . . .
+
+Perhaps too, one might hazard, Benham was dreaming when he thought
+the noble life a human possibility.  Perhaps man, like the ape and
+the hyaena and the tapeworm and many other of God's necessary but
+less attractive creatures, is not for such exalted ends.  That doubt
+never seems to have got a lodgment in Benham's skull; though at
+times one might suppose it the basis of White's thought.  You will
+find in all Benham's story, if only it can be properly told, now
+subdued, now loud and amazed and distressed, but always traceable,
+this startled, protesting question, "BUT WHY THE DEVIL AREN'T WE?"
+As though necessarily we ought to be.  He never faltered in his
+persuasion that behind the dingy face of this world, the earthy
+stubbornness, the baseness and dulness of himself and all of us,
+lurked the living jewels of heaven, the light of glory, things
+unspeakable.  At first it seemed to him that one had only just to
+hammer and will, and at the end, after a life of willing and
+hammering, he was still convinced there was something, something in
+the nature of an Open Sesame, perhaps a little more intricate than
+one had supposed at first, a little more difficult to secure, but
+still in that nature, which would suddenly roll open for mankind the
+magic cave of the universe, that precious cave at the heart of all
+things, in which one must believe.
+
+And then life--life would be the wonder it so perplexingly just
+isn't. . . .
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Benham did not go about the world telling people of this consuming
+research.  He was not the prophet or preacher of his idea.  It was
+too living and intricate and uncertain a part of him to speak freely
+about.  It was his secret self; to expose it casually would have
+shamed him.  He drew all sorts of reserves about him, he wore his
+manifest imperfections turned up about him like an overcoat in
+bitter wind.  He was content to be inexplicable.  His thoughts led
+him to the conviction that this magnificent research could not be,
+any more than any other research can be, a solitary enterprise, but
+he delayed expression; in a mighty writing and stowing away of these
+papers he found a relief from the unpleasant urgency to confess and
+explain himself prematurely.  So that White, though he knew Benham
+with the intimacy of an old schoolfellow who had renewed his
+friendship, and had shared his last days and been a witness of his
+death, read the sheets of manuscript often with surprise and with a
+sense of added elucidation.
+
+And, being also a trained maker of books, White as he read was more
+and more distressed that an accumulation so interesting should be so
+entirely unshaped for publication.  "But this will never make a
+book," said White with a note of personal grievance.  His hasty
+promise in their last moments together had bound him, it seemed, to
+a task he now found impossible.  He would have to work upon it
+tremendously; and even then he did not see how it could be done.
+
+This collection of papers was not a story, not an essay, not a
+confession, not a diary.  It was--nothing definable.  It went into
+no conceivable covers.  It was just, White decided, a proliferation.
+A vast proliferation.  It wanted even a title.  There were signs
+that Benham had intended to call it THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE, and that
+he had tried at some other time the title of AN ESSAY ON
+ARISTOCRACY.  Moreover, it would seem that towards the end he had
+been disposed to drop the word "aristocratic" altogether, and adopt
+some such phrase as THE LARGER LIFE.  Once it was LIFE SET FREE.  He
+had fallen away more and more from nearly everything that one
+associates with aristocracy--at the end only its ideals of
+fearlessness and generosity remained.
+
+Of all these titles THE ARISTOCRATIC LIFE seemed at first most like
+a clue to White.  Benham's erratic movements, his sudden impulses,
+his angers, his unaccountable patiences, his journeys to strange
+places, and his lapses into what had seemed to be pure
+adventurousness, could all be put into system with that.  Before
+White had turned over three pages of the great fascicle of
+manuscript that was called Book Two, he had found the word "Bushido"
+written with a particularly flourishing capital letter and twice
+repeated.  "That was inevitable," said White with the comforting
+regret one feels for a friend's banalities.  "And it dates . . .
+[unreadable] this was early. . . ."
+
+"Modern aristocracy, the new aristocracy," he read presently, "has
+still to be discovered and understood.  This is the necessary next
+step for mankind.  As far as possible I will discover and understand
+it, and as far as I know it I will be it.  This is the essential
+disposition of my mind.  God knows I have appetites and sloths and
+habits and blindnesses, but so far as it is in my power to release
+myself I will escape to this. . . ."
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+White sat far into the night and for several nights turning over
+papers and rummaging in untidy drawers.  Memories came back to him
+of his dead friend and pieced themselves together with other
+memories and joined on to scraps in this writing.  Bold yet
+convincing guesses began to leap across the gaps.  A story shaped
+itself. . . .
+
+The story began with the schoolfellow he had known at
+Minchinghampton School.
+
+Benham had come up from his father's preparatory school at Seagate.
+He had been a boy reserved rather than florid in his acts and
+manners, a boy with a pale face, incorrigible hair and brown eyes
+that went dark and deep with excitement.  Several times White had
+seen him excited, and when he was excited Benham was capable of
+tensely daring things.  On one occasion he had insisted upon walking
+across a field in which was an aggressive bull.  It had been put
+there to prevent the boys taking a short cut to the swimming place.
+It had bellowed tremendously and finally charged him.  He had dodged
+it and got away; at the time it had seemed an immense feat to White
+and the others who were safely up the field.  He had walked to the
+fence, risking a second charge by his deliberation.  Then he had sat
+on the fence and declared his intention of always crossing the field
+so long as the bull remained there.  He had said this with white
+intensity, he had stopped abruptly in mid-sentence, and then
+suddenly he had dropped to the ground, clutched the fence, struggled
+with heaving shoulders, and been sick.
+
+The combination of apparently stout heart and manifestly weak
+stomach had exercised the Minchinghampton intelligence profoundly.
+
+On one or two other occasions Benham had shown courage of the same
+rather screwed-up sort.  He showed it not only in physical but in
+mental things.  A boy named Prothero set a fashion of religious
+discussion in the school, and Benham, after some self-examination,
+professed an atheistical republicanism rather in the manner of
+Shelley.  This brought him into open conflict with Roddles, the
+History Master.  Roddles had discovered these theological
+controversies in some mysterious way, and he took upon himself to
+talk at Benham and Prothero.  He treated them to the common
+misapplication of that fool who "hath said in his heart there is no
+God."  He did not perceive there was any difference between the fool
+who says a thing in his heart and one who says it in the dormitory.
+He revived that delectable anecdote of the Eton boy who professed
+disbelief and was at once "soundly flogged" by his head master.
+"Years afterwards that boy came back to thank ----"
+
+"Gurr," said Prothero softly.  "STEW--ard !"
+
+"Your turn next, Benham," whispered an orthodox controversialist.
+
+"Good Lord!  I'd like to see him," said Benham with a forced
+loudness that could scarcely be ignored.
+
+The subsequent controversy led to an interview with the head.  From
+it Benham emerged more whitely strung up than ever.  "He said he
+would certainly swish me if I deserved it, and I said I would
+certainly kill him if he did."
+
+"And then?"
+
+"He told me to go away and think it over.  Said he would preach
+about it next Sunday. . . . Well, a swishing isn't a likely thing
+anyhow.  But I would. . . .  There isn't a master here I'd stand a
+thrashing from--not one. . . .  And because I choose to say what I
+think! . . .  I'd run amuck."
+
+For a week or so the school was exhilarated by a vain and ill-
+concealed hope that the head might try it just to see if Benham
+would.  It was tantalizingly within the bounds of possibility. . . .
+
+These incidents came back to White's mind as he turned over the
+newspapers in the upper drawer of the bureau.  The drawer was
+labelled "Fear--the First Limitation," and the material in it was
+evidently designed for the opening volume of the great unfinished
+book.  Indeed, a portion of it was already arranged and written up.
+
+As White read through this manuscript he was reminded of a score of
+schoolboy discussions Benham and he and Prothero had had together.
+Here was the same old toughness of mind, a kind of intellectual
+hardihood, that had sometimes shocked his schoolfellows.  Benham had
+been one of those boys who do not originate ideas very freely, but
+who go out to them with a fierce sincerity.  He believed and
+disbelieved with emphasis.  Prothero had first set him doubting, but
+it was Benham's own temperament took him on to denial.  His youthful
+atheism had been a matter for secret consternation in White.  White
+did not believe very much in God even then, but this positive
+disbelieving frightened him.  It was going too far.  There had been
+a terrible moment in the dormitory, during a thunderstorm, a
+thunderstorm so vehement that it had awakened them all, when Latham,
+the humourist and a quietly devout boy, had suddenly challenged
+Benham to deny his Maker.
+
+"NOW say you don't believe in God?"
+
+Benham sat up in bed and repeated his negative faith, while little
+Hopkins, the Bishop's son, being less certain about the accuracy of
+Providence than His aim, edged as far as he could away from Benham's
+cubicle and rolled his head in his bedclothes.
+
+"And anyhow," said Benham, when it was clear that he was not to be
+struck dead forthwith, "you show a poor idea of your God to think
+he'd kill a schoolboy for honest doubt.  Even old Roddles--"
+
+"I can't listen to you," cried Latham the humourist, "I can't listen
+to you.  It's--HORRIBLE."
+
+"Well, who began it?" asked Benham.
+
+A flash of lightning lit the dormitory and showed him to White
+white-faced and ablaze with excitement, sitting up with the bed-
+clothes about him.  "Oh WOW!" wailed the muffled voice of little
+Hopkins as the thunder burst like a giant pistol overhead, and he
+buried his head still deeper in the bedclothes and gave way to
+unappeasable grief.
+
+Latham's voice came out of the darkness.  "This ATHEISM that you and
+Billy Prothero have brought into the school--"
+
+He started violently at another vivid flash, and every one remained
+silent, waiting for the thunder. . . .
+
+But White remembered no more of the controversy because he had made
+a frightful discovery that filled and blocked his mind.  Every time
+the lightning flashed, there was a red light in Benham's eyes. . . .
+
+It was only three days after when Prothero discovered exactly the
+same phenomenon in the School House boothole and talked of cats and
+cattle, that White's confidence in their friend was partially
+restored. . . .
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+"Fear, the First Limitation"--his title indicated the spirit of
+Benham's opening book very clearly.  His struggle with fear was the
+very beginning of his soul's history.  It continued to the end.  He
+had hardly decided to lead the noble life before he came bump
+against the fact that he was a physical coward.  He felt fear
+acutely.  "Fear," he wrote, "is the foremost and most persistent of
+the shepherding powers that keep us in the safe fold, that drive us
+back to the beaten track and comfort and--futility.  The beginning
+of all aristocracy is the subjugation of fear."
+
+At first the struggle was so great that he hated fear without any
+qualification; he wanted to abolish it altogether.
+
+"When I was a boy," he writes, "I thought I would conquer fear for
+good and all, and never more be troubled by it.  But it is not to be
+done in that way.  One might as well dream of having dinner for the
+rest of one's life.  Each time and always I have found that it has
+to be conquered afresh.  To this day I fear, little things as well
+as big things.  I have to grapple with some little dread every day--
+urge myself. . . .  Just as I have to wash and shave myself every
+day. . . .  I believe it is so with every one, but it is difficult
+to be sure; few men who go into dangers care very much to talk about
+fear. . . ."
+
+Later Benham found some excuses for fear, came even to dealings with
+fear.  He never, however, admits that this universal instinct is any
+better than a kindly but unintelligent nurse from whose fostering
+restraints it is man's duty to escape.  Discretion, he declared,
+must remain; a sense of proportion, an "adequacy of enterprise," but
+the discretion of an aristocrat is in his head, a tactical detail,
+it has nothing to do with this visceral sinking, this ebb in the
+nerves.  "From top to bottom, the whole spectrum of fear is bad,
+from panic fear at one extremity down to that mere disinclination
+for enterprise, that reluctance and indolence which is its lowest
+phase.  These are things of the beast, these are for creatures that
+have a settled environment, a life history, that spin in a cage of
+instincts.  But man is a beast of that kind no longer, he has left
+his habitat, he goes out to limitless living. . . ."
+
+This idea of man going out into new things, leaving securities,
+habits, customs, leaving his normal life altogether behind him,
+underlay all Benham's aristocratic conceptions.  And it was natural
+that he should consider fear as entirely inconvenient, treat it
+indeed with ingratitude, and dwell upon the immense liberations that
+lie beyond for those who will force themselves through its
+remonstrances. . . .
+
+Benham confessed his liability to fear quite freely in these notes.
+His fear of animals was ineradicable.  He had had an overwhelming
+dread of bears until he was twelve or thirteen, the child's
+irrational dread of impossible bears, bears lurking under the bed
+and in the evening shadows.  He confesses that even up to manhood he
+could not cross a field containing cattle without keeping a wary eye
+upon them--his bull adventure rather increased than diminished that
+disposition--he hated a strange dog at his heels and would manoeuvre
+himself as soon as possible out of reach of the teeth or heels of a
+horse.  But the peculiar dread of his childhood was tigers.  Some
+gaping nursemaid confronted him suddenly with a tiger in a cage in
+the menagerie annexe of a circus.  "My small mind was overwhelmed."
+
+"I had never thought," White read, "that a tiger was much larger
+than a St. Bernard dog. . . .  This great creature! . . .  I could
+not believe any hunter would attack such a monster except by stealth
+and with weapons of enormous power. . . .
+
+"He jerked himself to and fro across his cramped, rickety cage and
+looked over my head with yellow eyes--at some phantom far away.
+Every now and then he snarled.  The contempt of his detestable
+indifference sank deeper and deeper into my soul.  I knew that were
+the cage to vanish I should stand there motionless, his helpless
+prey.  I knew that were he at large in the same building with me I
+should be too terror-stricken to escape him.  At the foot of a
+ladder leading clear to escape I should have awaited him paralyzed.
+At last I gripped my nurse's hand.  'Take me away,' I whispered.
+
+"In my dreams that night he stalked me.  I made my frozen flight
+from him, I slammed a door on him, and he thrust his paw through a
+panel as though it had been paper and clawed for me.  The paw got
+longer and longer. . . .
+
+"I screamed so loudly that my father came up from his study.
+
+"I remember that he took me in his arms.
+
+"'It's only a big sort of pussy, Poff,' he said.  'FELIS TIGRIS.
+FELIS, you know, means cat.'
+
+"But I knew better.  I was in no mood then for my father's
+insatiable pedagoguery.
+
+"'And my little son mustn't be a coward.' . . .
+
+"After that I understood I must keep silence and bear my tigers
+alone.
+
+"For years the thought of that tiger's immensity haunted my mind.
+In my dreams I cowered before it a thousand times; in the dusk it
+rarely failed me.  On the landing on my way to bed there was a patch
+of darkness beyond a chest that became a lurking horror for me, and
+sometimes the door of my father's bedroom would stand open and there
+was a long buff and crimson-striped shape, by day indeed an ottoman,
+but by night--.  Could an ottoman crouch and stir in the flicker of
+a passing candle?  Could an ottoman come after you noiselessly, and
+so close that you could not even turn round upon it?  No!"
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+When Benham was already seventeen and, as he supposed, hardened
+against his fear of beasts, his friend Prothero gave him an account
+of the killing of an old labouring man by a stallion which had
+escaped out of its stable.  The beast had careered across a field,
+leapt a hedge and come upon its victim suddenly.  He had run a few
+paces and stopped, trying to defend his head with the horse rearing
+over him.  It beat him down with two swift blows of its fore hoofs,
+one, two, lifted him up in its long yellow teeth and worried him as
+a terrier does a rat--the poor old wretch was still able to make a
+bleating sound at that--dropped him, trampled and kicked him as he
+tried to crawl away, and went on trampling and battering him until
+he was no more than a bloody inhuman bundle of clothes and mire.
+For more than half an hour this continued, and then its animal rage
+was exhausted and it desisted, and went and grazed at a little
+distance from this misshapen, hoof-marked, torn, and muddy remnant
+of a man.  No one it seems but a horror-stricken child knew what was
+happening. . . .
+
+This picture of human indignity tortured Benham's imagination much
+more than it tortured the teller of the tale.  It filled him with
+shame and horror.  For three or four years every detail of that
+circumstantial narrative seemed unforgettable.  A little lapse from
+perfect health and the obsession returned.  He could not endure the
+neighing of horses: when he saw horses galloping in a field with him
+his heart stood still.  And all his life thereafter he hated horses.
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+A different sort of fear that also greatly afflicted Benham was due
+to a certain clumsiness and insecurity he felt in giddy and unstable
+places.  There he was more definitely balanced between the
+hopelessly rash and the pitifully discreet.
+
+He had written an account of a private struggle between himself and
+a certain path of planks and rock edges called the Bisse of Leysin.
+This happened in his adolescence.  He had had a bad attack of
+influenza and his doctor had sent him to a little hotel--the only
+hotel it was in those days--at Montana in Valais.  There, later,
+when he had picked up his strength, his father was to join him and
+take him mountaineering, that second-rate mountaineering which is so
+dear to dons and schoolmasters.  When the time came he was ready for
+that, but he had had his experiences.  He had gone through a phase
+of real cowardice.  He was afraid, he confessed, before even he
+reached Montana; he was afraid of the steepness of the mountains.
+He had to drive ten or twelve miles up and up the mountain-side, a
+road of innumerable hairpin bends and precipitous banks, the horse
+was gaunt and ugly with a disposition to shy, and he confesses he
+clutched the side of the vehicle and speculated how he should jump
+if presently the whole turnout went tumbling over. . . .
+
+"And afterwards I dreamt dreams of precipices.  I made strides over
+precipices, I fell and fell with a floating swiftness towards remote
+valleys, I was assailed by eagles upon a perilous ledge that
+crumbled away and left me clinging by my nails to nothing."
+
+The Bisse of Leysin is one of those artificial water-courses which
+bring water from some distant source to pastures that have an
+insufficient or uncertain supply.  It is a little better known than
+most because of a certain exceptional boldness in its construction;
+for a distance of a few score yards it runs supported by iron
+staples across the front of a sheer precipice, and for perhaps half
+a mile it hangs like an eyebrow over nearly or quite vertical walls
+of pine-set rock.  Beside it, on the outer side of it, runs a path,
+which becomes an offhand gangway of planking at the overhanging
+places.  At one corner, which gives the favourite picture postcard
+from Montana, the rocks project so sharply above the water that the
+passenger on the gangway must crouch down upon the bending plank as
+he walks.  There is no hand-hold at all.
+
+A path from Montana takes one over a pine-clad spur and down a
+precipitous zig-zag upon the middle of the Bisse, and thither Benham
+came, fascinated by the very fact that here was something of which
+the mere report frightened him.  He had to walk across the cold
+clear rush of the Bisse upon a pine log, and then he found himself
+upon one of the gentler interludes of the Bisse track.  It was a
+scrambling path nearly two feet wide, and below it were slopes, but
+not so steep as to terrify.  At a vast distance below he saw through
+tree-stems and blue haze a twisted strand of bright whiteness, the
+river that joins the Rhone at Sion.  It looped about and passed out
+of sight remotely beneath his feet.  He turned to the right, and
+came to a corner that overhung a precipice.  He craned his head
+round this corner and saw the evil place of the picture-postcards.
+
+He remained for a long time trying to screw himself up to walk along
+the jagged six-inch edge of rock between cliff and torrent into
+which the path has shrunken, to the sagging plank under the
+overhanging rock beyond.
+
+He could not bring himself to do that.
+
+"It happened that close to the corner a large lump of rock and earth
+was breaking away, a cleft was opening, so that presently, it seemed
+possible at any moment, the mass would fall headlong into the blue
+deeps below.  This impending avalanche was not in my path along the
+Bisse, it was no sort of danger to me, but in some way its
+insecurity gave a final touch to my cowardice.  I could not get
+myself round that corner."
+
+He turned away.  He went and examined the planks in the other
+direction, and these he found less forbidding.  He crossed one
+precipitous place, with a fall of twoscore feet or less beneath him,
+and found worse ahead.  There also he managed.  A third place was
+still more disagreeable.  The plank was worn and thin, and sagged
+under him.  He went along it supporting himself against the rock
+above the Bisse with an extended hand.  Halfway the rock fell back,
+so that there was nothing whatever to hold.  He stopped, hesitating
+whether he should go back--but on this plank there was no going back
+because no turning round seemed practicable.  While he was still
+hesitating there came a helpful intervention.  Behind him he saw a
+peasant appearing and disappearing behind trees and projecting rock
+masses, and coming across the previous plank at a vigorous trot. . . .
+
+Under the stimulus of a spectator Benham got to the end of this
+third place without much trouble.  Then very politely he stood aside
+for the expert to go ahead so that he could follow at his own pace.
+
+There were, however, more difficulties yet to come, and a
+disagreeable humiliation.  That confounded peasant developed a
+parental solicitude.  After each crossing he waited, and presently
+began to offer advice and encouragement.  At last came a place where
+everything was overhanging, where the Bisse was leaking, and the
+plank wet and slippery.  The water ran out of the leak near the brim
+of the wooden channel and fell in a long shivering thread of silver.
+THERE WAS NO SOUND OF ITS FALL.  It just fell--into a void.  Benham
+wished he had not noted that.  He groaned, but faced the plank; he
+knew this would be the slowest affair of all.
+
+The peasant surveyed him from the further side.
+
+"Don't be afraid!" cried the peasant in his clumsy Valaisian French,
+and returned, returning along the plank that seemed quite
+sufficiently loaded without him, extending a charitable hand.
+
+"Damn!" whispered Benham, but he took the hand.
+
+Afterwards, rather ignobly, he tried to explain in his public-school
+French.  "Pas de peur," he said.  "Pas de peur.  Mais la tete, n'a
+pas l'habitude."
+
+The peasant, failing to understand, assured him again that there was
+no danger.
+
+("Damn!")
+
+Benham was led over all the other planks, he was led as if he was an
+old lady crossing a glacier.  He was led into absolute safety, and
+shamefacedly he rewarded his guide.  Then he went a little way and
+sat down, swore softly, and watched the honest man go striding and
+plunging down towards Lens until he was out of sight.
+
+"Now," said Benham to himself, "if I do not go back along the planks
+my secret honour is gone for ever."
+
+He told himself that he had not a good head, that he was not well,
+that the sun was setting and the light no longer good, that he had a
+very good chance indeed of getting killed.  Then it came to him
+suddenly as a clear and simple truth, as something luminously plain,
+that it is better to get killed than go away defeated by such fears
+and unsteadiness as his.  The change came into his mind as if a
+white light were suddenly turned on--where there had been nothing
+but shadows and darkness.  He rose to his feet and went swiftly and
+intently the whole way back, going with a kind of temperate
+recklessness, and, because he was no longer careful, easily.  He
+went on beyond his starting place toward the corner, and did that
+supreme bit, to and fro, that bit where the lump was falling away,
+and he had to crouch, as gaily as the rest.  Then he recrossed the
+Bisse upon the pine log, clambered up through the pines to the
+crest, and returned through the meadows to his own hotel.
+
+After that he should have slept the sleep of contentment, but
+instead he had quite dreadful nightmares, of hanging in frozen fear
+above incredible declivities, of ill-aimed leaps across chasms to
+slippery footholds, of planks that swayed and broke suddenly in the
+middle and headed him down and down. . . .
+
+The next day in the sunshine he walked the Bisse again with those
+dreams like trailing mists in his mind, and by comparison the path
+of the Bisse was nothing, it was like walking along a kerbstone, it
+was an exercise for young ladies. . . .
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+In his younger days Benham had regarded Fear as a shameful secret
+and as a thing to be got rid of altogether.  It seemed to him that
+to feel fear was to fall short of aristocracy, and in spite of the
+deep dreads and disgusts that haunted his mind, he set about the
+business of its subjugation as if it were a spiritual amputation.
+But as he emerged from the egotism of adolescence he came to realize
+that this was too comprehensive an operation; every one feels fear,
+and your true aristocrat is not one who has eliminated, but one who
+controls or ignores it.  Brave men are men who do things when they
+are afraid to do them, just as Nelson, even when he was seasick, and
+he was frequently seasick, was still master of the sea.  Benham
+developed two leading ideas about fear; one that it is worse at the
+first onset, and far worse than any real experience, and the other
+that fear is essentially a social instinct.  He set himself upon
+these lines to study--what can we call it?--the taming of fear, the
+nature, care, and management of fear. . . .
+
+"Fear is very like pain in this, that it is a deterrent thing.  It
+is superficial.  Just as a man's skin is infinitely more sensitive
+than anything inside. . . .  Once you have forced yourself or have
+been forced through the outward fear into vivid action or
+experience, you feel very little.  The worst moment is before things
+happen.  Rowe, the African sportsman, told me that he had seen
+cowardice often enough in the presence of lions, but he had never
+seen any one actually charged by a lion who did not behave well.  I
+have heard the same thing of many sorts of dangers.
+
+"I began to suspect this first in the case of falling or jumping
+down.  Giddiness may be an almost intolerable torture, and falling
+nothing of the sort.  I once saw the face of an old man who had
+flung himself out of a high window in Rome, and who had been killed
+instantly on the pavement; it was not simply a serene face, it was
+glad, exalted.  I suspect that when we have broken the shell of
+fear, falling may be delightful.  Jumping down is, after all, only a
+steeper tobogganing, and tobogganing a milder jumping down.  Always
+I used to funk at the top of the Cresta run.  I suffered sometimes
+almost intolerably; I found it almost impossible to get away.  The
+first ten yards was like being slashed open with a sharp sword.  But
+afterwards there was nothing but joyful thrills.  All instinct, too,
+fought against me when I tried high diving.  I managed it, and began
+to like it.  I had to give it up because of my ears, but not until I
+had established the habit of stepping through that moment of
+disinclination.
+
+"I was Challoner's passenger when he was killed at Sheerness.  That
+was a queer unexpected experience, you may have supposed it an agony
+of terror, but indeed there was no fear in it at all.  At any rate,
+I do not remember a moment of fear; it has gone clean out of my
+memory if ever it was there.  We were swimming high and fast, three
+thousand feet or so, in a clear, sweet air over the town of
+Sheerness.  The river, with a string of battleships, was far away to
+the west of us, and the endless grey-blue flats of the Thames to the
+north.  The sun was low behind a bank of cloud.  I was watching a
+motor-car, which seemed to be crawling slowly enough, though, no
+doubt, it was making a respectable pace, between two hedges down
+below.  It is extraordinary how slowly everything seems to be going
+when one sees it from such an height.
+
+"Then the left wing of the monoplane came up like a door that slams,
+some wires whistled past my head, and one whipped off my helmet, and
+then, with the seat slipping away from me, down we went.  I snatched
+unavailingly for the helmet, and then gripped the sides.  It was
+like dropping in a boat suddenly into the trough of a wave--and
+going on dropping.  We were both strapped, and I got my feet against
+the side and clung to the locked second wheel.
+
+"The sensation was as though something like an intermittent electric
+current was pouring through me.  It's a ridiculous image to use, I
+can't justify it, but it was as if I was having cold blue light
+squirted through every pore of my being.  There was an astonishment,
+a feeling of confirmation.  'Of course these things do happen
+sometimes,' I told myself.  I don't remember that Challoner looked
+round or said anything at all.  I am not sure that I looked at
+him. . . .
+
+"There seemed to be a long interval of intensely excited curiosity,
+and I remember thinking, 'Lord, but we shall come a smash in a
+minute!'  Far ahead I saw the grey sheds of Eastchurch and people
+strolling about apparently unaware of our disaster.  There was a
+sudden silence as Challoner stopped the engine. . . .
+
+"But the point I want to insist upon is that I did not feel afraid.
+I was simply enormously, terribly INTERESTED. . . .
+
+"There came a tremendous jolt and a lunge, and we were both tipped
+forward, so that we were hanging forehead down by our straps, and it
+looked as if the sheds were in the sky, then I saw nothing but sky,
+then came another vast swerve, and we were falling sideways,
+sideways. . . .
+
+"I was altogether out of breath and PHYSICALLY astonished, and I
+remember noting quite intelligently as we hit the ground how the
+green grass had an effect of POURING OUT in every direction from
+below us. . . .
+
+"Then I remember a jerk and a feeling that I was flying up again.  I
+was astonished by a tremendous popping--fabric, wires, everything
+seemed going pop, pop, pop, like a machine-gun, and then came a
+flash of intense pain as my arm crumpled up.  It was quite
+impersonal pain.  As impersonal as seeing intense colour.
+SPLINTERS!  I remember the word came into my head instantly.  I
+remember that very definitely.
+
+"I thought, I suppose, my arm was in splinters.  Or perhaps of the
+scraps and ends of rods and wires flying about us.  It is curious
+that while I remember the word I cannot recall the idea. . . .
+
+"When I became conscious again the chief thing present in my mind
+was that all those fellows round were young soldiers who wouldn't at
+all understand bad behaviour.  My arm was--orchestral, but still far
+from being real suffering IN me.  Also I wanted to know what
+Challoner had got.  They wouldn't understand my questions, and then
+I twisted round and saw from the negligent way his feet came out
+from under the engine that he must be dead.  And dark red stains
+with bright red froth--
+
+"Of course!
+
+"There again the chief feeling was a sense of oddity.  I wasn't
+sorry for him any more than I was for myself.
+
+"It seemed to me that it was all right with us both, remarkable,
+vivid, but all right. . . ."
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+"But though there is little or no fear in an aeroplane, even when it
+is smashing up, there is fear about aeroplanes.  There is something
+that says very urgently, 'Don't,' to the man who looks up into the
+sky.  It is very interesting to note how at a place like Eastchurch
+or Brooklands the necessary discretion trails the old visceral
+feeling with it, and how men will hang about, ready to go up,
+resolved to go up, but delaying.  Men of indisputable courage will
+get into a state between dread and laziness, and waste whole hours
+of flying weather on any excuse or no excuse.  Once they are up that
+inhibition vanishes.  The man who was delaying and delaying half an
+hour ago will now be cutting the most venturesome capers in the air.
+Few men are in a hurry to get down again.  I mean that quite apart
+from the hesitation of landing, they like being up there."
+
+Then, abruptly, Benham comes back to his theory.
+
+"Fear, you see, is the inevitable janitor, but it is not the ruler
+of experience.  That is what I am driving at in all this.  The bark
+of danger is worse than its bite.  Inside the portals there may be
+events and destruction, but terror stays defeated at the door.  It
+may be that when that old man was killed by a horse the child who
+watched suffered more than he did. . . .
+
+"I am sure that was so. . . ."
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+As White read Benham's notes and saw how his argument drove on, he
+was reminded again and again of those schoolboy days and Benham's
+hardihood, and his own instinctive unreasonable reluctance to follow
+those gallant intellectual leads.  If fear is an ancient instinctive
+boundary that the modern life, the aristocratic life, is bound to
+ignore and transcend, may this not also be the case with pain?  We
+do a little adventure into the "life beyond fear"; may we not also
+think of adventuring into the life beyond pain?  Is pain any saner a
+warning than fear?  May not pain just as much as fear keep us from
+possible and splendid things?  But why ask a question that is
+already answered in principle in every dentist's chair?  Benham's
+idea, however, went much further than that, he was clearly
+suggesting that in pain itself, pain endured beyond a certain pitch,
+there might come pleasure again, an intensity of sensation that
+might have the colour of delight.  He betrayed a real anxiety to
+demonstrate this possibility, he had the earnestness of a man who is
+sensible of dissentient elements within.  He hated the thought of
+pain even more than he hated fear.  His arguments did not in the
+least convince White, who stopped to poke the fire and assure
+himself of his own comfort in the midst of his reading.
+
+Young people and unseasoned people, Benham argued, are apt to
+imagine that if fear is increased and carried to an extreme pitch it
+becomes unbearable, one will faint or die; given a weak heart, a
+weak artery or any such structural defect and that may well happen,
+but it is just as possible that as the stimulation increases one
+passes through a brief ecstasy of terror to a new sane world,
+exalted but as sane as normal existence.  There is the calmness of
+despair.  Benham had made some notes to enforce this view, of the
+observed calm behaviour of men already hopelessly lost, men on
+sinking ships, men going to execution, men already maimed and
+awaiting the final stroke, but for the most part these were merely
+references to books and periodicals.  In exactly the same way, he
+argued, we exaggerate the range of pain as if it were limitless.  We
+think if we are unthinking that it passes into agony and so beyond
+endurance to destruction.  It probably does nothing of the kind.
+Benham compared pain to the death range of the electric current.  At
+a certain voltage it thrills, at a greater it torments and
+convulses, at a still greater it kills.  But at enormous voltages,
+as Tesla was the first to demonstrate, it does no injury.  And
+following on this came memoranda on the recorded behaviour of
+martyrs, on the self-torture of Hindoo ascetics, of the defiance of
+Red Indian prisoners.
+
+"These things," Benham had written, "are much more horrible when one
+considers them from the point of view of an easy-chair";--White gave
+an assenting nod--"ARE THEY REALLY HORRIBLE AT ALL?  Is it possible
+that these charred and slashed and splintered persons, those Indians
+hanging from hooks, those walkers in the fiery furnace, have had
+glimpses through great windows that were worth the price they paid
+for them?  Haven't we allowed those checks and barriers that are so
+important a restraint upon childish enterprise, to creep up into and
+distress and distort adult life? . . .
+
+"The modern world thinks too much as though painlessness and freedom
+from danger were ultimate ends.  It is fear-haunted, it is troubled
+by the thoughts of pain and death, which it has never met except as
+well-guarded children meet these things, in exaggerated and
+untestable forms, in the menagerie or in nightmares.  And so it
+thinks the discovery of anaesthetics the crowning triumph of
+civilization, and cosiness and innocent amusement, those ideals of
+the nursery, the whole purpose of mankind. . . ."
+
+"Mm," said White, and pressed his lips together and knotted his
+brows and shook his head.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+But the bulk of Benham's discussion of fear was not concerned with
+this perverse and overstrained suggestion of pleasure reached
+through torture, this exaggeration of the man resolved not to shrink
+at anything; it was an examination of the present range and use of
+fear that led gradually to something like a theory of control and
+discipline.  The second of his two dominating ideas was that fear is
+an instinct arising only in isolation, that in a crowd there may be
+a collective panic, but that there is no real individual fear.
+Fear, Benham held, drives the man back to the crowd, the dog to its
+master, the wolf to the pack, and when it is felt that the danger is
+pooled, then fear leaves us.  He was quite prepared to meet the
+objection that animals of a solitary habit do nevertheless exhibit
+fear.  Some of this apparent fear, he argued, was merely discretion,
+and what is not discretion is the survival of an infantile
+characteristic.  The fear felt by a tiger cub is certainly a social
+emotion, that drives it back to the other cubs, to its mother and
+the dark hiding of the lair.  The fear of a fully grown tiger sends
+it into the reeds and the shadows, to a refuge, that must be "still
+reminiscent of the maternal lair."  But fear has very little hold
+upon the adult solitary animal, it changes with extreme readiness to
+resentment and rage.
+
+"Like most inexperienced people," ran his notes, "I was astonished
+at the reported feats of men in war; I believed they were
+exaggerated, and that there was a kind of unpremeditated conspiracy
+of silence about their real behaviour.  But when on my way to visit
+India for the third time I turned off to see what I could of the
+fighting before Adrianople, I discovered at once that a thousand
+casually selected conscripts will, every one of them, do things
+together that not one of them could by any means be induced to do
+alone.  I saw men not merely obey orders that gave them the nearly
+certain prospect of death, but I saw them exceeding orders; I saw
+men leap out of cover for the mere sake of defiance, and fall shot
+through and smashed by a score of bullets.  I saw a number of
+Bulgarians in the hands of the surgeon, several quite frightfully
+wounded, refuse chloroform merely to impress the English onlooker,
+some of their injuries I could scarcely endure to see, and I watched
+a line of infantry men go on up a hill and keep on quite manifestly
+cheerful with men dropping out and wriggling, and men dropping out
+and lying still until every other man was down. . . .  Not one man
+would have gone up that hill alone, without onlookers. . . ."
+
+Rowe, the lion hunter, told Benham that only on one occasion in his
+life had he given way to ungovernable fear, and that was when he was
+alone.  Many times he had been in fearful situations in the face of
+charging lions and elephants, and once he had been bowled over and
+carried some distance by a lion, but on none of these occasions had
+fear demoralized him.  There was no question of his general pluck.
+But on one occasion he was lost in rocky waterless country in
+Somaliland.  He strayed out in the early morning while his camels
+were being loaded, followed some antelope too far, and lost his
+bearings.  He looked up expecting to see the sun on his right hand
+and found it on his left.  He became bewildered.  He wandered some
+time and then fired three signal shots and got no reply.  Then
+losing his head he began shouting.  He had only four or five more
+cartridges and no water-bottle.  His men were accustomed to his
+going on alone, and might not begin to remark upon his absence until
+sundown. . . .  It chanced, however, that one of the shikari noted
+the water-bottle he had left behind and organized a hunt for him.
+
+Long before they found him he had passed to an extremity of terror.
+The world had become hideous and threatening, the sun was a pitiless
+glare, each rocky ridge he clambered became more dreadful than the
+last, each new valley into which he looked more hateful and
+desolate, the cramped thorn bushes threatened him gauntly, the rocks
+had a sinister lustre, and in every blue shadow about him the night
+and death lurked and waited.  There was no hurry for them, presently
+they would spread out again and join and submerge him, presently in
+the confederated darkness he could be stalked and seized and slain.
+Yes, this he admitted was real fear.  He had cracked his voice,
+yelling as a child yells.  And then he had become afraid of his own
+voice. . . .
+
+"Now this excess of fear in isolation, this comfort in a crowd, in
+support and in a refuge, even when support or refuge is quite
+illusory, is just exactly what one would expect of fear if one
+believed it to be an instinct which has become a misfit.  In the
+ease of the soldier fear is so much a misfit that instead of saving
+him for the most part it destroys him.  Raw soldiers under fire
+bunch together and armies fight in masses, men are mowed down in
+swathes, because only so is the courage of the common men sustained,
+only so can they be brave, albeit spread out and handling their
+weapons as men of unqualified daring would handle them they would be
+infinitely safer and more effective. . . .
+
+"And all of us, it may be, are restrained by this misfit fear from a
+thousand bold successful gestures of mind and body, we are held back
+from the attainment of mighty securities in pitiful temporary
+shelters that are perhaps in the end no better than traps. . . ."
+
+From such considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the
+crowd can be replaced in a man's imagination, how far some
+substitute for that social backing can be made to serve the same
+purpose in neutralizing fear.  He wrote with the calm of a man who
+weighs the probabilities of a riddle, and with the zeal of a man
+lost to every material consideration.  His writing, it seemed to
+White, had something of the enthusiastic whiteness of his face, the
+enthusiastic brightness of his eyes.  We can no more banish fear
+from our being at present than we can carve out the fleshy pillars
+of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain.  It is deep in our
+inheritance.  As deep as hunger.  And just as we have to satisfy
+hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy
+the unconquerable importunity of fear.  We have to reassure our
+faltering instincts.  There must be something to take the place of
+lair and familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we
+must carry with us into the lonely places.  For it is true that man
+has now not only to learn to fight in open order instead of in a
+phalanx, but he has to think and plan and act in open order, to live
+in open order. . . .
+
+Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, "This
+brings me to God."
+
+"The devil it does!" said White, roused to a keener attention.
+
+"By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so
+long as we feel indeed alone.  An isolated man, an egoist, an
+Epicurean man, will always fail himself in the solitary place.
+There must be something more with us to sustain us against this vast
+universe than the spark of life that began yesterday and must be
+extinguished to-morrow.  There can be no courage beyond social
+courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd, until there is in us
+the sense of God.  But God is a word that covers a multitude of
+meanings.  When I was a boy I was a passionate atheist, I defied
+God, and so far as God is the mere sanction of social traditions and
+pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd's will in canonicals, I
+do still deny him and repudiate him.  That God I heard of first from
+my nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper God of all the
+nursemaids of mankind.  But there is another God than that God of
+obedience, God the immortal adventurer in me, God who calls men from
+home and country, God scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in
+a nail-pierced body out of death and came not to bring peace but a
+sword."
+
+With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who
+was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of
+Benham's spirit.  They were written in pencil; they were unfinished
+when he died.
+
+ (Surely the man was not a Christian!)
+
+"You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you
+cannot suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain
+because you have identified your life with the honour of mankind and
+the insatiable adventurousness of man's imagination, so that the
+possible death is negligible and the possible achievement altogether
+outweighs it." . . .
+
+White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.
+
+He was a member of the Rationalist Press Association, and he had
+always taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever.
+But this was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it
+seemed to him, a posthumous betrayal. . . .
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon
+Benham.  He had gone with Kepple, of the forestry department, into
+the jungle country in the hills above the Tapti.  He had been very
+anxious to see something of that aspect of Indian life, and he had
+snatched at the chance Kepple had given him.  But they had scarcely
+started before the expedition was brought to an end by an accident,
+Kepple was thrown by a pony and his ankle broken.  He and Benham
+bandaged it as well as they could, and a litter was sent for, and
+meanwhile they had to wait in the camp that was to have been the
+centre of their jungle raids.  The second day of this waiting was
+worse for Kepple than the first, and he suffered much from the
+pressure of this amateurish bandaging.  In the evening Benham got
+cool water from the well and rearranged things better; the two men
+dined and smoked under their thatched roof beneath the big banyan,
+and then Kepple, tired out by his day of pain, was carried to his
+tent.  Presently he fell asleep and Benham was left to himself.
+
+Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to
+sleep.  He felt full of life and anxious for happenings.
+
+He went back and sat down upon the iron bedstead beneath the banyan,
+that Kepple had lain upon through the day, and he watched the soft
+immensity of the Indian night swallow up the last lingering colours
+of the world.  It left the outlines, it obliterated nothing, but it
+stripped off the superficial reality of things.  The moon was full
+and high overhead, and the light had not so much gone as changed
+from definition and the blazing glitter and reflections of solidity
+to a translucent and unsubstantial clearness.  The jungle that
+bordered the little encampment north, south, and west seemed to have
+crept a little nearer, enriched itself with blackness, taken to
+itself voices.
+
+(Surely it had been silent during the day.)
+
+A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead grass and the
+leaves.  In the day the air had been still.
+
+Immediately after the sunset there had been a great crying of
+peacocks in the distance, but that was over now; the crickets,
+however, were still noisy, and a persistent sound had become
+predominant, an industrious unmistakable sound, a sound that took
+his mind back to England, in midsummer.  It was like a watchman's
+rattle--a nightjar!
+
+So there were nightjars here in India, too!  One might have expected
+something less familiar.  And then came another cry from far away
+over the heat-stripped tree-tops, a less familiar cry.  It was
+repeated.  Was that perhaps some craving leopard, a tiger cat, a
+panther?--
+
+"HUNT, HUNT"; that might be a deer.
+
+Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite
+close at hand.  A monkey? . . .
+
+These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were
+bats. . . .
+
+Of course, the day jungle is the jungle asleep.  This was its waking
+hour.  Now the deer were arising from their forms, the bears
+creeping out of their dens amidst the rocks and blundering down the
+gullies, the tigers and panthers and jungle cats stalking
+noiselessly from their lairs in the grass.  Countless creatures that
+had hidden from the heat and pitiless exposure of the day stood now
+awake and alertly intent upon their purposes, grazed or sought
+water, flitting delicately through the moonlight and shadows.  The
+jungle was awakening.  Again Benham heard that sound like the
+belling of a stag. . . .
+
+This was the real life of the jungle, this night life, into which
+man did not go.  Here he was on the verge of a world that for all
+the stuffed trophies of the sportsman and the specimens of the
+naturalist is still almost as unknown as if it was upon another
+planet.  What intruders men are, what foreigners in the life of this
+ancient system!
+
+He looked over his shoulder, and there were the two little tents,
+one that sheltered Kepple and one that awaited him, and beyond, in
+an irregular line, glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men.  One or
+two turbaned figures still flitted about, and there was a voice--
+low, monotonous--it must have been telling a tale.  Further, sighing
+and stirring ever and again, were tethered beasts, and then a great
+pale space of moonlight and the clumsy outlines of the village well.
+The clustering village itself slept in darkness beyond the mango
+trees, and still remoter the black encircling jungle closed in.  One
+might have fancied this was the encampment of newly-come invaders,
+were it not for the larger villages that are overgrown with thickets
+and altogether swallowed up again in the wilderness, and for the
+deserted temples that are found rent asunder by the roots of trees
+and the ancient embankments that hold water only for the drinking of
+the sambur deer. . . .
+
+Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again. . . .
+
+He had come far out of his way to visit this strange world of the
+ancient life, that now recedes and dwindles before our new
+civilization, that seems fated to shrivel up and pass altogether
+before the dry advance of physical science and material
+organization.  He was full of unsatisfied curiosities about its
+fierce hungers and passions, its fears and cruelties, its instincts
+and its well-nigh incommunicable and yet most precious
+understandings.  He had long ceased to believe that the wild beast
+is wholly evil, and safety and plenty the ultimate good for men. . . .
+
+Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life
+than he was now.
+
+It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand
+and so inaccessible. . . .
+
+As Benham sat brooding over his disappointment the moon, swimming on
+through the still circle of the hours, passed slowly over him.  The
+lights and shadows about him changed by imperceptible gradations and
+a long pale alley where the native cart track drove into the forest,
+opened slowly out of the darkness, slowly broadened, slowly
+lengthened.  It opened out to him with a quality of invitation. . . .
+
+There was the jungle before him.  Was it after all so inaccessible?
+
+"Come!" the road said to him.
+
+Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the moonlight and stood
+motionless.
+
+Was he afraid?
+
+Even now some hungry watchful monster might lurk in yonder shadows,
+watching with infinite still patience.  Kepple had told him how they
+would sit still for hours--staring unblinkingly as cats stare at a
+fire--and then crouch to advance.  Beneath the shrill overtone of
+the nightjars, what noiseless grey shapes, what deep breathings and
+cracklings and creepings might there not be? . . .
+
+Was he afraid?
+
+That question determined him to go.
+
+He hesitated whether he should take a gun.  A stick?  A gun, he
+knew, was a dangerous thing to an inexperienced man.  No!  He would
+go now, even as he was with empty hands.  At least he would go as
+far as the end of that band of moonlight.  If for no other reason
+than because he was afraid.  NOW!
+
+For a moment it seemed to him as though his feet were too heavy to
+lift and then, hands in pockets, khaki-clad, an almost invisible
+figure, he strolled towards the cart-track.
+
+Come to that, he halted for a moment to regard the distant fires of
+the men.  No one would miss him.  They would think he was in his
+tent.  He faced the stirring quiet ahead.  The cart-track was a
+rutted path of soft, warm sand, on which he went almost noiselessly.
+A bird squabbled for an instant in a thicket.  A great white owl
+floated like a flake of moonlight across the track and vanished
+without a sound among the trees.
+
+Along the moonlit path went Benham, and when he passed near trees
+his footsteps became noisy with the rustle and crash of dead leaves.
+The jungle was full of moonlight; twigs, branches, creepers, grass-
+clumps came out acutely vivid.  The trees and bushes stood in pools
+of darkness, and beyond were pale stretches of misty moonshine and
+big rocks shining with an unearthly lustre.  Things seemed to be
+clear and yet uncertain.  It was as if they dissolved or retired a
+little and then returned to solidity.
+
+A sudden chattering broke out overhead, and black across the great
+stars soared a flying squirrel and caught a twig, and ran for
+shelter.  A second hesitated in a tree-top and pursued.  They chased
+each other and vanished abruptly.  He forgot his sense of insecurity
+in the interest of these active little silhouettes.  And he noted
+how much bigger and more wonderful the stars can look when one sees
+them through interlacing branches.
+
+Ahead was darkness; but not so dark when he came to it that the
+track was invisible.  He was at the limit of his intention, but now
+he saw that that had been a childish project.  He would go on, he
+would walk right into the jungle.  His first disinclination was
+conquered, and the soft intoxication of the subtropical moonshine
+was in his blood. . . .  But he wished he could walk as a spirit
+walks, without this noise of leaves. . . .
+
+Yes, this was very wonderful and beautiful, and there must always be
+jungles for men to walk in.  Always there must be jungles. . . .
+
+Some small beast snarled and bolted from under his feet.  He stopped
+sharply.  He had come into a darkness under great boughs, and now he
+stood still as the little creature scuttled away.  Beyond the track
+emerged into a dazzling whiteness. . . .
+
+In the stillness he could hear the deer belling again in the
+distance, and then came a fuss of monkeys in a group of trees near
+at hand.  He remained still until this had died away into
+mutterings.
+
+Then on the verge of movement he was startled by a ripe mango that
+slipped from its stalk and fell out of the tree and struck his hand.
+It took a little time to understand that, and then he laughed, and
+his muscles relaxed, and he went on again.
+
+A thorn caught at him and he disentangled himself.
+
+He crossed the open space, and the moon was like a great shield of
+light spread out above him.  All the world seemed swimming in its
+radiance.  The stars were like lamps in a mist of silvery blue.
+
+The track led him on across white open spaces of shrivelled grass
+and sand, amidst trees where shadows made black patternings upon the
+silver, and then it plunged into obscurities.  For a time it lifted,
+and then on one hand the bush fell away, and he saw across a vast
+moonlit valley wide undulations of open cultivation, belts of
+jungle, copses, and a great lake as black as ebony.  For a time the
+path ran thus open, and then the jungle closed in again and there
+were more thickets, more levels of grass, and in one place far
+overhead among the branches he heard and stood for a time perplexed
+at a vast deep humming of bees. . . .
+
+Presently a black monster with a hunched back went across his path
+heedless of him and making a great noise in the leaves.  He stood
+quite still until it had gone.  He could not tell whether it was a
+boar or hyaena; most probably, he thought, a boar because of the
+heaviness of its rush.
+
+The path dropped downhill for a time, crossed a ravine, ascended.
+He passed a great leafless tree on which there were white flowers.
+On the ground also, in the darkness under the tree, there were these
+flowers; they were dropping noiselessly, and since they were visible
+in the shadows, it seemed to him that they must be phosphorescent.
+And they emitted a sweetish scent that lay heavily athwart the path.
+Presently he passed another such tree.  Then he became aware of a
+tumult ahead of him, a smashing of leaves, a snorting and
+slobbering, grunting and sucking, a whole series of bestial sounds.
+He halted for a little while, and then drew nearer, picking his
+steps to avoid too great a noise.  Here were more of those white-
+blossomed trees, and beneath, in the darkness, something very black
+and big was going to and fro, eating greedily.  Then he found that
+there were two and then more of these black things, three or four of
+them.
+
+Curiosity made Benham draw nearer, very softly.
+
+Presently one showed in a patch of moonlight, startlingly big, a
+huge, black hairy monster with a long white nose on a grotesque
+face, and he was stuffing armfuls of white blossom into his mouth
+with his curved fore claws.  He took not the slightest notice of the
+still man, who stood perhaps twenty yards away from him.  He was too
+blind and careless.  He snorted and smacked his slobbering lips, and
+plunged into the shadows again.  Benham heard him root among the
+leaves and grunt appreciatively.  The air was heavy with the reek of
+the crushed flowers.
+
+For some time Benham remained listening to and peering at these
+preoccupied gluttons.  At last he shrugged his shoulders, and left
+them and went on his way.  For a long time he could hear them, then
+just as he was on the verge of forgetting them altogether, some
+dispute arose among them, and there began a vast uproar, squeals,
+protests, comments, one voice ridiculously replete and
+authoritative, ridiculously suggestive of a drunken judge with his
+mouth full, and a shrill voice of grievance high above the others. . . .
+
+The uproar of the bears died away at last, almost abruptly, and left
+the jungle to the incessant night-jars. . . .
+
+For what end was this life of the jungle?
+
+All Benham's senses were alert to the sounds and appearances about
+him, and at the same time his mind was busy with the perplexities of
+that riddle.  Was the jungle just an aimless pool of life that man
+must drain and clear away?  Or is it to have a use in the greater
+life of our race that now begins?  Will man value the jungle as he
+values the precipice, for the sake of his manhood?  Will he preserve
+it?
+
+Man must keep hard, man must also keep fierce.  Will the jungle keep
+him fierce?
+
+For life, thought Benham, there must be insecurity. . . .
+
+He had missed the track. . . .
+
+He was now in a second ravine.  He was going downward, walking on
+silvery sand amidst great boulders, and now there was a new sound in
+the air--.  It was the croaking of frogs.  Ahead was a solitary
+gleam.  He was approaching a jungle pool. . . .
+
+Suddenly the stillness was alive, in a panic uproar.  "HONK!" cried
+a great voice, and "HONK!"  There was a clatter of hoofs, a wild
+rush--a rush as it seemed towards him.  Was he being charged?  He
+backed against a rock.  A great pale shape leaped by him, an
+antlered shape.  It was a herd of big deer bolting suddenly out of
+the stillness.  He heard the swish and smash of their retreat grow
+distant, disperse.  He remained standing with his back to the rock.
+
+Slowly the strophe and antistrophe of frogs and goat-suckers resumed
+possession of his consciousness.  But now some primitive instinct
+perhaps or some subconscious intimation of danger made him
+meticulously noiseless.
+
+He went on down a winding sound-deadening path of sand towards the
+drinking-place.  He came to a wide white place that was almost
+level, and beyond it under clustering pale-stemmed trees shone the
+mirror surface of some ancient tank, and, sharp and black, a dog-
+like beast sat on its tail in the midst of this space, started
+convulsively and went slinking into the undergrowth.  Benham paused
+for a moment and then walked out softly into the light, and, behold!
+as if it were to meet him, came a monster, a vast dark shape drawing
+itself lengthily out of the blackness, and stopped with a start as
+if it had been instantly changed to stone.
+
+It had stopped with one paw advanced.  Its striped mask was light
+and dark grey in the moonlight, grey but faintly tinged with
+ruddiness; its mouth was a little open, its fangs and a pendant of
+viscous saliva shone vivid.  Its great round-pupilled eyes regarded
+him stedfastly.  At last the nightmare of Benham's childhood had
+come true, and he was face to face with a tiger, uncaged,
+uncontrolled.
+
+For some moments neither moved, neither the beast nor the man.  They
+stood face to face, each perhaps with an equal astonishment,
+motionless and soundless, in that mad Indian moonlight that makes
+all things like a dream.
+
+Benham stood quite motionless, and body and mind had halted
+together.  That confrontation had an interminableness that had
+nothing to do with the actual passage of time.  Then some trickle of
+his previous thoughts stirred in the frozen quiet of his mind.
+
+He spoke hoarsely.  "I am Man," he said, and lifted a hand as he
+spoke.  "The Thought of the world."
+
+His heart leapt within him as the tiger moved.  But the great beast
+went sideways, gardant, only that its head was low, three noiseless
+instantaneous strides it made, and stood again watching him.
+
+"Man," he said, in a voice that had no sound, and took a step
+forward.
+
+"Wough!"  With two bounds the monster had become a great grey streak
+that crackled and rustled in the shadows of the trees.  And then it
+had vanished, become invisible and inaudible with a kind of
+instantaneousness.
+
+For some seconds or some minutes Benham stood rigid, fearlessly
+expectant, and then far away up the ravine he heard the deer repeat
+their cry of alarm, and understood with a new wisdom that the tiger
+had passed among them and was gone. . . .
+
+He walked on towards the deserted tank and now he was talking aloud.
+
+"I understand the jungle.  I understand. . . .  If a few men die
+here, what matter?  There are worse deaths than being killed. . . .
+
+"What is this fool's trap of security?
+
+"Every time in my life that I have fled from security I have fled
+from death. . . .
+
+"Let men stew in their cities if they will.  It is in the lonely
+places, in jungles and mountains, in snows and fires, in the still
+observatories and the silent laboratories, in those secret and
+dangerous places where life probes into life, it is there that the
+masters of the world, the lords of the beast, the rebel sons of Fate
+come to their own. . . .
+
+"You sleeping away there in the cities!  Do you know what it means
+for you that I am here to-night?
+
+"Do you know what it means to you?
+
+"I am just one--just the precursor.
+
+"Presently, if you will not budge, those hot cities must be burnt
+about you.  You must come out of them. . . ."
+
+He wandered now uttering his thoughts as they came to him, and he
+saw no more living creatures because they fled and hid before the
+sound of his voice.  He wandered until the moon, larger now and
+yellow tinged, was low between the black bars of the tree stems.
+And then it sank very suddenly behind a hilly spur and the light
+failed swiftly.
+
+He stumbled and went with difficulty.  He could go no further among
+these rocks and ravines, and he sat down at the foot of a tree to
+wait for day.
+
+He sat very still indeed.
+
+A great stillness came over the world, a velvet silence that wrapped
+about him, as the velvet shadows wrapped about him.  The corncrakes
+had ceased, all the sounds and stir of animal life had died away,
+the breeze had fallen.  A drowsing comfort took possession of him.
+He grew more placid and more placid still.  He was enormously
+content to find that fear had fled before him and was gone.  He
+drifted into that state of mind when one thinks without ideas, when
+one's mind is like a starless sky, serene and empty.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+Some hours later Benham found that the trees and rocks were growing
+visible again, and he saw a very bright star that he knew must be
+Lucifer rising amidst the black branches.  He was sitting upon a
+rock at the foot of a slender-stemmed leafless tree.  He had been
+asleep, and it was daybreak.  Everything was coldly clear and
+colourless.
+
+He must have slept soundly.
+
+He heard a cock crow, and another answer--jungle fowl these must be,
+because there could be no village within earshot--and then far away
+and bringing back memories of terraced houses and ripe walled
+gardens, was the scream of peacocks.  And some invisible bird was
+making a hollow beating sound among the trees near at hand.
+TUNK. . . .  TUNK, and out of the dry grass came a twittering.
+
+There was a green light in the east that grew stronger, and the
+stars after their magnitudes were dissolving in the blue; only a few
+remained faintly visible.  The sound of birds increased.  Through
+the trees he saw towering up a great mauve thing like the back of a
+monster,--but that was nonsense, it was the crest of a steep
+hillside covered with woods of teak.
+
+He stood up and stretched himself, and wondered whether he had
+dreamed of a tiger.
+
+He tried to remember and retrace the course of his over-night
+wanderings.
+
+A flight of emerald parakeets tore screaming through the trees, and
+then far away uphill he heard the creaking of a cart.
+
+He followed the hint of a footmark, and went back up the glen slowly
+and thoughtfully.
+
+Presently he came to a familiar place, a group of trees, a sheet of
+water, and the ruins of an old embankment.  It was the ancient tank
+of his overnight encounter.  The pool of his dream?
+
+With doubt still in his mind, he walked round its margin to the
+sandy level beyond, and cast about and sought intently, and at last
+found, and then found clearly, imposed upon the tracks of several
+sorts of deer and the footprints of many biggish birds, first the
+great spoor of the tiger and then his own.  Here the beast had
+halted, and here it had leapt aside.  Here his own footmarks
+stopped.  Here his heels had come together.
+
+It had been no dream.
+
+There was a white mist upon the water of the old tank like the bloom
+upon a plum, and the trees about it seemed smaller and the sand-
+space wider and rougher than they had seemed in the moonshine.  Then
+the ground had looked like a floor of frosted silver.
+
+And thence he went on upward through the fresh morning, until just
+as the east grew red with sunrise, he reached the cart-track from
+which he had strayed overnight.  It was, he found, a longer way back
+to the camp than he remembered it to be.  Perhaps he had struck the
+path further along.  It curved about and went up and down and
+crossed three ravines.  At last he came to that trampled place of
+littered white blossom under great trees where he had seen the
+bears.
+
+The sunlight went before him in a sheaf of golden spears, and his
+shadow, that was at first limitless, crept towards his feet.  The
+dew had gone from the dead grass and the sand was hot to his dry
+boots before he came back into the open space about the great banyan
+and the tents.  And Kepple, refreshed by a night's rest and coffee,
+was wondering loudly where the devil he had gone.
+
+
+
+THE STORY
+
+
+CHAPTER THE FIRST
+
+THE BOY GROWS UP
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Benham was the son of a schoolmaster.  His father was assistant
+first at Cheltenham, and subsequently at Minchinghampton, and then
+he became head and later on sole proprietor of Martindale House, a
+high-class preparatory school at Seagate.  He was extremely
+successful for some years, as success goes in the scholastic
+profession, and then disaster overtook him in the shape of a
+divorce.  His wife, William Porphyry's mother, made the acquaintance
+of a rich young man named Nolan, who was recuperating at Seagate
+from the sequelae of snake-bite, malaria, and a gun accident in
+Brazil.  She ran away with him, and she was divorced.  She was,
+however, unable to marry him because he died at Wiesbaden only three
+days after the Reverend Harold Benham obtained his decree absolute.
+Instead, therefore, being a woman of great spirit, enterprise and
+sweetness, she married Godfrey Marayne, afterwards Sir Godfrey
+Marayne, the great London surgeon.
+
+Nolan was a dark, rather melancholy and sentimental young man, and
+he left about a third of his very large fortune entirely to Mrs.
+Benham and the rest to her in trust for her son, whom he deemed
+himself to have injured.  With this and a husband already
+distinguished, she returned presently to London, and was on the
+whole fairly well received there.
+
+It was upon the reverend gentleman at Seagate that the brunt of this
+divorce fell.  There is perhaps a certain injustice in the fact that
+a schoolmaster who has lost his wife should also lose the more
+valuable proportion of his pupils, but the tone of thought in
+England is against any association of a schoolmaster with
+matrimonial irregularity.  And also Mr. Benham remarried.  It would
+certainly have been better for him if he could have produced a
+sister.  His school declined and his efforts to resuscitate it only
+hastened its decay.  Conceiving that he could now only appeal to the
+broader-minded, more progressive type of parent, he became an
+educational reformer, and wrote upon modernizing the curriculum with
+increasing frequency to the TIMES.  He expended a considerable
+fraction of his dwindling capital upon a science laboratory and a
+fives court; he added a London Bachelor of Science with a Teaching
+Diploma to the school staff, and a library of about a thousand
+volumes, including the Hundred Best Books as selected by the late
+Lord Avebury, to the school equipment.  None of these things did
+anything but enhance the suspicion of laxity his wife's escapade had
+created in the limited opulent and discreet class to which his
+establishment appealed.  One boy who, under the influence of the
+Hundred Best Books, had quoted the ZEND-AVESTA to an irascible but
+influential grandfather, was withdrawn without notice or
+compensation in the middle of the term.  It intensifies the tragedy
+of the Reverend Harold Benham's failure that in no essential respect
+did his school depart from the pattern of all other properly-
+conducted preparatory schools.
+
+In appearance he was near the average of scholastic English
+gentlemen.  He displayed a manifest handsomeness somewhat weakened
+by disregard and disuse, a large moustache and a narrow high
+forehead.  His rather tired brown eyes were magnified by glasses.
+He was an active man in unimportant things, with a love for the
+phrase "ship-shape," and he played cricket better than any one else
+on the staff.  He walked in wide strides, and would sometimes use
+the tail of his gown on the blackboard.  Like so many clergymen and
+schoolmasters, he had early distrusted his natural impulse in
+conversation, and had adopted the defensive precaution of a rather
+formal and sonorous speech, which habit had made a part of him.  His
+general effect was of one who is earnestly keeping up things that
+might otherwise give way, keeping them up by act and voice, keeping
+up an atmosphere of vigour and success in a school that was only too
+manifestly attenuated, keeping up a pretentious economy of
+administration in a school that must not be too manifestly
+impoverished, keeping up a claim to be in the scientific van and
+rather a flutterer of dovecots--with its method of manual training
+for example--keeping up ESPRIT DE CORPS and the manliness of himself
+and every one about him, keeping up his affection for his faithful
+second wife and his complete forgetfulness of and indifference to
+that spirit of distracting impulse and insubordination away there in
+London, who had once been his delight and insurmountable difficulty.
+"After my visits to her," wrote Benham, "he would show by a hundred
+little expressions and poses and acts how intensely he wasn't noting
+that anything of the sort had occurred."
+
+But one thing that from the outset the father seemed to have failed
+to keep up thoroughly was his intention to mould and dominate his
+son.
+
+The advent of his boy had been a tremendous event in the reverend
+gentleman's life.  It is not improbable that his disposition to
+monopolize the pride of this event contributed to the ultimate
+disruption of his family.  It left so few initiatives within the
+home to his wife.  He had been an early victim to that wave of
+philoprogenitive and educational enthusiasm which distinguished the
+closing decade of the nineteenth century.  He was full of plans in
+those days for the education of his boy, and the thought of the
+youngster played a large part in the series of complicated emotional
+crises with which he celebrated the departure of his wife, crises in
+which a number of old school and college friends very generously
+assisted--spending weekends at Seagate for this purpose, and
+mingling tobacco, impassioned handclasps and suchlike consolation
+with much patient sympathetic listening to his carefully balanced
+analysis of his feelings.  He declared that his son was now his one
+living purpose in life, and he sketched out a scheme of moral and
+intellectual training that he subsequently embodied in five very
+stimulating and intimate articles for the SCHOOL WORLD, but never
+put into more than partial operation.
+
+"I have read my father's articles upon this subject," wrote Benham,
+"and I am still perplexed to measure just what I owe to him.  Did he
+ever attempt this moral training he contemplated so freely?  I don't
+think he did.  I know now, I knew then, that he had something in his
+mind. . . .  There were one or two special walks we had together, he
+invited me to accompany him with a certain portentousness, and we
+would go out pregnantly making superficial remarks about the school
+cricket and return, discussing botany, with nothing said.
+
+"His heart failed him.
+
+"Once or twice, too, he seemed to be reaching out at me from the
+school pulpit.
+
+"I think that my father did manage to convey to me his belief that
+there were these fine things, honour, high aims, nobilities.  If I
+did not get this belief from him then I do not know how I got it.
+But it was as if he hinted at a treasure that had got very dusty in
+an attic, a treasure which he hadn't himself been able to spend. . . ."
+
+The father who had intended to mould his son ended by watching him
+grow, not always with sympathy or understanding.  He was an
+overworked man assailed by many futile anxieties.  One sees him
+striding about the establishment with his gown streaming out behind
+him urging on the groundsman or the gardener, or dignified,
+expounding the particular advantages of Seagate to enquiring
+parents, one sees him unnaturally cheerful and facetious at the
+midday dinner table, one imagines him keeping up high aspirations in
+a rather too hastily scribbled sermon in the school pulpit, or
+keeping up an enthusiasm for beautiful language in a badly-prepared
+lesson on Virgil, or expressing unreal indignation and unjustifiably
+exalted sentiments to evil doers, and one realizes his disadvantage
+against the quiet youngster whose retentive memory was storing up
+all these impressions for an ultimate judgment, and one understands,
+too, a certain relief that mingled with his undeniable emotion when
+at last the time came for young Benham, "the one living purpose" of
+his life, to be off to Minchinghampton and the next step in the
+mysterious ascent of the English educational system.
+
+Three times at least, and with an increased interval, the father
+wrote fine fatherly letters that would have stood the test of
+publication.  Then his communications became comparatively hurried
+and matter-of-fact.  His boy's return home for the holidays was
+always rather a stirring time for his private feelings, but he
+became more and more inexpressive.  He would sometimes lay a hand on
+those growing shoulders and then withdraw it.  They felt braced-up
+shoulders, stiffly inflexible or--they would wince.  And when one
+has let the habit of indefinite feelings grow upon one, what is
+there left to say?  If one did say anything one might be asked
+questions. . . .
+
+One or two of the long vacations they spent abroad together.  The
+last of these occasions followed Benham's convalescence at Montana
+and his struggle with the Bisse; the two went to Zermatt and did
+several peaks and crossed the Theodule, and it was clear that their
+joint expeditions were a strain upon both of them.  The father
+thought the son reckless, unskilful, and impatient; the son found
+the father's insistence upon guides, ropes, precautions, the
+recognized way, the highest point and back again before you get a
+chill, and talk about it sagely but very, very modestly over pipes,
+tiresome.  He wanted to wander in deserts of ice and see over the
+mountains, and discover what it is to be benighted on a precipice.
+And gradually he was becoming familiar with his father's repertory
+of Greek quotations.  There was no breach between them, but each
+knew that holiday was the last they would ever spend together. . . .
+
+The court had given the custody of young William Porphyry into his
+father's hands, but by a generous concession it was arranged that
+his mother should have him to see her for an hour or so five times a
+year.  The Nolan legacy, however, coming upon the top of this,
+introduced a peculiar complication that provided much work for
+tactful intermediaries, and gave great and increasing scope for
+painful delicacies on the part of Mr. Benham as the boy grew up.
+
+"I see," said the father over his study pipe and with his glasses
+fixed on remote distances above the head of the current sympathizer,
+"I see more and more clearly that the tale of my sacrifices is not
+yet at an end. . . .  In many respects he is like her. . . .  Quick.
+Too quick. . . .  He must choose.  But I know his choice.  Yes,
+yes,--I'm not blind.  She's worked upon him. . . .  I have done what
+I could to bring out the manhood in him.  Perhaps it will bear the
+strain. . . .  It will be a wrench, old man--God knows."
+
+He did his very best to make it a wrench.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Benham's mother, whom he saw quarterly and also on the first of May,
+because it was her birthday, touched and coloured his imagination
+far more than his father did.  She was now Lady Marayne, and a
+prominent, successful, and happy little lady.  Her dereliction had
+been forgiven quite soon, and whatever whisper of it remained was
+very completely forgotten during the brief period of moral
+kindliness which followed the accession of King Edward the Seventh.
+It no doubt contributed to her social reinstatement that her former
+husband was entirely devoid of social importance, while, on the
+other hand, Sir Godfrey Marayne's temporary monopoly of the caecal
+operation which became so fashionable in the last decade of Queen
+Victoria's reign as to be practically epidemic, created a strong
+feeling in her favour.
+
+She was blue-eyed and very delicately complexioned, quick-moving,
+witty, given to little storms of clean enthusiasm; she loved
+handsome things, brave things, successful things, and the respect
+and affection of all the world.  She did quite what she liked upon
+impulse, and nobody ever thought ill of her.
+
+Her family were the Mantons of Blent, quite good west-country
+people.  She had broken away from them before she was twenty to
+marry Benham, whom she had idealized at a tennis party.  He had
+talked of his work and she had seen it in a flash, the noblest work
+in the world, him at his daily divine toil and herself a Madonna
+surrounded by a troupe of Blessed Boys--all of good family, some of
+quite the best.  For a time she had kept it up even more than he
+had, and then Nolan had distracted her with a realization of the
+heroism that goes to the ends of the earth.  She became sick with
+desire for the forests of Brazil, and the Pacific, and--a peak in
+Darien.  Immediately the school was frowsty beyond endurance, and
+for the first time she let herself perceive how dreadfully a
+gentleman and a scholar can smell of pipes and tobacco.  Only one
+course lay open to a woman of spirit. . . .
+
+For a year she did indeed live like a woman of spirit, and it was at
+Nolan's bedside that Marayne was first moved to admiration.  She was
+plucky.  All men love a plucky woman.
+
+Sir Godfrey Marayne smelt a good deal of antiseptic soap, but he
+talked in a way that amused her, and he trusted as well as adored
+her.  She did what she liked with his money, her own money, and her
+son's trust money, and she did very well.  From the earliest
+Benham's visits were to a gracious presence amidst wealthy
+surroundings.  The transit from the moral blamelessness of Seagate
+had an entirely misleading effect of ascent.
+
+Their earlier encounters became rather misty in his memory; they
+occurred at various hotels in Seagate.  Afterwards he would go,
+first taken by a governess, and later going alone, to Charing Cross,
+where he would be met, in earlier times by a maid and afterwards by
+a deferential manservant who called him "Sir," and conveyed,
+sometimes in a hansom cab and later in a smart brougham, by
+Trafalgar Square, Lower Regent Street, Piccadilly, and streets of
+increasing wealth and sublimity to Sir Godfrey's house in Desborough
+Street.  Very naturally he fell into thinking of these discreet and
+well-governed West End streets as a part of his mother's atmosphere.
+
+The house had a dignified portico, and always before he had got down
+to the pavement the door opened agreeably and a second respectful
+manservant stood ready.  Then came the large hall, with its
+noiseless carpets and great Chinese jars, its lacquered cabinets and
+the wide staircase, and floating down the wide staircase, impatient
+to greet him, light and shining as a flower petal, sweet and
+welcoming, radiating a joyfulness as cool and clear as a dewy
+morning, came his mother.  "WELL, little man, my son," she would cry
+in her happy singing voice, "WELL?"
+
+So he thought she must always be, but indeed these meetings meant
+very much to her, she dressed for them and staged them, she
+perceived the bright advantages of her rarity and she was quite
+determined to have her son when the time came to possess him.  She
+kissed him but not oppressively, she caressed him cleverly; it was
+only on these rare occasions that he was ever kissed or caressed,
+and she talked to his shy boyishness until it felt a more spirited
+variety of manhood.  "What have you been doing?" she asked, "since I
+saw you last."
+
+She never said he had grown, but she told him he looked tall; and
+though the tea was a marvellous display it was never an obtrusive
+tea, it wasn't poked at a fellow; a various plenty flowed well
+within reach of one's arm, like an agreeable accompaniment to their
+conversation.
+
+"What have you done?  All sorts of brave things?  Do you swim now?
+I can swim.  Oh! I can swim half a mile.  Some day we will swim
+races together.  Why not?  And you ride? . . .
+
+"The horse bolted--and you stuck on?  Did you squeak?  I stick on,
+but I HAVE to squeak.  But you--of course, No! you mustn't.  I'm
+just a little woman.  And I ride big horses. . . ."
+
+And for the end she had invented a characteristic little ceremony.
+
+She would stand up in front of him and put her hands on his
+shoulders and look into his face.
+
+"Clean eyes?" she would say.  "--still?"
+
+Then she would take his ears in her little firm hands and kiss very
+methodically his eyes and his forehead and his cheeks and at last
+his lips.  Her own eyes would suddenly brim bright with tears.
+
+"GO," she would say.
+
+That was the end.
+
+It seemed to Benham as though he was being let down out of a sunlit
+fairyland to this grey world again.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The contrast between Lady Marayne's pretty amenities and the good
+woman at Seagate who urged herself almost hourly to forget that
+William Porphyry was not her own son, was entirely unfair.  The
+second Mrs. Benham's conscientious spirit and a certain handsome
+ability about her fitted her far more than her predecessor for the
+onerous duties of a schoolmaster's wife, but whatever natural
+buoyancy she possessed was outweighed by an irrepressible conviction
+derived from an episcopal grandparent that the remarriage of
+divorced persons is sinful, and by a secret but well-founded doubt
+whether her husband loved her with a truly romantic passion.  She
+might perhaps have borne either of these troubles singly, but the
+two crushed her spirit.
+
+Her temperament was not one that goes out to meet happiness.  She
+had reluctant affections and suspected rather than welcomed the
+facility of other people's.  Her susceptibility to disagreeable
+impressions was however very ample, and life was fenced about with
+protections for her "feelings."  It filled young Benham with
+inexpressible indignations that his sweet own mother, so gay, so
+brightly cheerful that even her tears were stars, was never to be
+mentioned in his stepmother's presence, and it was not until he had
+fully come to years of reflection that he began to realize with what
+honesty, kindness and patience this naturally not very happy lady
+had nursed, protected, mended for and generally mothered him.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+As Benham grew to look manly and bear himself with pride, his
+mother's affection for him blossomed into a passion.  She made him
+come down to London from Cambridge as often as she could; she went
+about with him; she made him squire her to theatres and take her out
+to dinners and sup with her at the Carlton, and in the summer she
+had him with her at Chexington Manor, the Hertfordshire house Sir
+Godfrey had given her.  And always when they parted she looked into
+his eyes to see if they were still clean--whatever she meant by
+that--and she kissed his forehead and cheeks and eyes and lips.  She
+began to make schemes for his career, she contrived introductions
+she judged would be useful to him later.
+
+Everybody found the relationship charming.  Some of the more
+conscientious people, it is true, pretended to think that the
+Reverend Harold Benham was a first husband and long since dead, but
+that was all.  As a matter of fact, in his increasingly futile way
+he wasn't, either at Seagate or in the Educational Supplement of the
+TIMES.  But even the most conscientious of us are not obliged to go
+to Seagate or read the Educational Supplement of the TIMES.
+
+Lady Marayne's plans for her son's future varied very pleasantly.
+She was an industrious reader of biographies, and more particularly
+of the large fair biographies of the recently contemporary; they
+mentioned people she knew, they recalled scenes, each sowed its
+imaginative crop upon her mind, a crop that flourished and flowered
+until a newer growth came to oust it.  She saw her son a diplomat, a
+prancing pro-consul, an empire builder, a trusted friend of the
+august, the bold leader of new movements, the saviour of ancient
+institutions, the youngest, brightest, modernest of prime ministers--
+or a tremendously popular poet.  As a rule she saw him unmarried--
+with a wonderful little mother at his elbow.  Sometimes in romantic
+flashes he was adored by German princesses or eloped with Russian
+grand-duchesses!  But such fancies were HORS D'OEUVRE.  The modern
+biography deals with the career.  Every project was bright, every
+project had GO--tremendous go.  And they all demanded a hero,
+debonnaire and balanced.  And Benham, as she began to perceive,
+wasn't balanced.  Something of his father had crept into him, a
+touch of moral stiffness.  She knew the flavour of that so well.  It
+was a stumbling, an elaboration, a spoil-sport and weakness.  She
+tried not to admit to herself that even in the faintest degree it
+was there.  But it was there.
+
+"Tell me all that you are doing NOW," she said to him one afternoon
+when she had got him to herself during his first visit to Chexington
+Manor.  "How do you like Cambridge?  Are you making friends?  Have
+you joined that thing--the Union, is it?--and delivered your maiden
+speech?  If you're for politics, Poff, that's your game.  Have you
+begun it?"
+
+She lay among splashes of sunshine on the red cushions in the punt,
+a little curled-up figure of white, with her sweet pale animated
+face warmed by the reflection of her red sunshade, and her eyes like
+little friendly heavens.  And he, lean, and unconsciously graceful,
+sat at her feet and admired her beyond measure, and rejoiced that
+now at last they were going to be ever so much together, and doubted
+if it would be possible ever to love any other woman so much as he
+did her.
+
+He tried to tell her of Cambridge and his friends and the
+undergraduate life he was leading, but he found it difficult.  All
+sorts of things that seemed right and good at Trinity seemed out of
+drawing in the peculiar atmosphere she created about her.  All sorts
+of clumsiness and youthfulness in himself and his associates he felt
+she wouldn't accept, couldn't accept, that it would be wrong of her
+to accept.  Before they could come before her they must wear a
+bravery.  He couldn't, for instance, tell her how Billy Prothero,
+renouncing vanity and all social pretension, had worn a straw hat
+into November and the last stages of decay, and how it had been
+burnt by a special commission ceremonially in the great court.  He
+couldn't convey to her the long sessions of beer and tobacco and
+high thinking that went on in Prothero's rooms into the small hours.
+A certain Gothic greyness and flatness and muddiness through which
+the Cambridge spirit struggles to its destiny, he concealed from
+her.  What remained to tell was--attenuated.  He could not romance.
+So she tried to fill in his jejune outlines.  She tried to inspire a
+son who seemed most unaccountably up to nothing.
+
+"You must make good friends," she said.  "Isn't young Lord Breeze at
+your college?  His mother the other day told me he was.  And Sir
+Freddy Quenton's boy.  And there are both the young Baptons at
+Cambridge."
+
+He knew one of the Baptons.
+
+"Poff," she said suddenly, "has it ever occurred to you what you are
+going to do afterwards.  Do you know you are going to be quite well
+off?"
+
+Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment.  "My father said
+something.  He was rather vague.  It wasn't his affair--that kind of
+thing."
+
+"You will be quite well off," she repeated, without any complicating
+particulars.  "You will be so well off that it will be possible for
+you to do anything almost that you like in the world.  Nothing will
+tie you.  Nothing. . . ."
+
+"But--HOW well off?"
+
+"You will have several thousands a year."
+
+"Thousands?"
+
+"Yes.  Why not?"
+
+"But--Mother, this is rather astounding. . . .  Does this mean there
+are estates somewhere, responsibilities?"
+
+"It is just money.  Investments."
+
+"You know, I've imagined--.  I've thought always I should have to DO
+something."
+
+"You MUST do something, Poff.  But it needn't be for a living.  The
+world is yours without that.  And so you see you've got to make
+plans.  You've got to know the sort of people who'll have things in
+their hands.  You've got to keep out of--holes and corners.  You've
+got to think of Parliament and abroad.  There's the army, there's
+diplomacy.  There's the Empire.  You can be a Cecil Rhodes if you
+like.  You can be a Winston. . . ."
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Perhaps it was only the innate eagerness of Lady Marayne which made
+her feel disappointed in her son's outlook upon life.  He did not
+choose among his glittering possibilities, he did not say what he
+was going to be, proconsul, ambassador, statesman, for days.  And he
+talked VAGUELY of wanting to do something fine, but all in a fog.  A
+boy of nearly nineteen ought to have at least the beginnings of
+SAVOIR FAIRE.
+
+Was he in the right set?  Was he indeed in the right college?
+Trinity, by his account, seemed a huge featureless place--and might
+he not conceivably be LOST in it?  In those big crowds one had to
+insist upon oneself.  Poff never insisted upon himself--except quite
+at the wrong moment.  And there was this Billy 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 affections of
+men.  So that it is among its foremost distinctions that its heart
+is steeled. . . ."
+
+There this odd fragment ended and White was left to resume the
+interrupted autobiography.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+What moods, what passions, what nights of despair and gathering
+storms of anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are
+buried and hidden and implied in every love story!  What a waste is
+there of exquisite things!  So each spring sees a million glorious
+beginnings, a sunlit heaven in every opening leaf, warm perfection
+in every stirring egg, hope and fear and beauty beyond computation
+in every forest tree; and in the autumn before the snows come they
+have all gone, of all that incalculable abundance of life, of all
+that hope and adventure, excitement and deliciousness, there is
+scarcely more to be found than a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead
+leaf, black mould or a rotting feather. . . .
+
+White held the ten or twelve pencilled pages that told how Benham
+and Amanda drifted into antagonism and estrangement and as he held
+it he thought of the laughter and delight they must have had
+together, the exquisite excitements of her eye, the racing colour of
+her cheek, the gleams of light upon her skin, the flashes of wit
+between them, the sense of discovery, the high rare paths they had
+followed, the pools in which they had swum together.  And now it was
+all gone into nothingness, there was nothing left of it, nothing at
+all, but just those sheets of statement, and it may be, stored away
+in one single mind, like things forgotten in an attic, a few
+neglected faded memories. . . .
+
+And even those few sheets of statement were more than most love
+leaves behind it.  For a time White would not read them.  They lay
+neglected on his knee as he sat back in Benham's most comfortable
+chair and enjoyed an entirely beautiful melancholy.
+
+White too had seen and mourned the spring.
+
+Indeed, poor dear! he had seen and mourned several springs. . . .
+
+With a sigh he took up the manuscript and read Benham's desiccated
+story of intellectual estrangement, and how in the end he had
+decided to leave his wife and go out alone upon that journey of
+inquiry he had been planning when first he met her.
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+Amanda had come back to England in a state of extravagantly vigorous
+womanhood.  Benham's illness, though it lasted only two or three
+weeks, gave her a sense of power and leadership for which she had
+been struggling instinctively ever since they came together.  For a
+time at Locarno he was lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she
+formed her bright and limited plans for London.  Benham had no plans
+as yet but only a sense of divergence, as though he was being pulled
+in opposite directions by two irresistible forces.  To her it was
+plain that he needed occupation, some distinguished occupation, and
+she could imagine nothing better for him than a political career.
+She perceived he had personality, that he stood out among men so
+that his very silences were effective.  She loved him immensely, and
+she had tremendous ambitions for him and through him.
+
+And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with
+appetite.  Her soul thirsted for London.  It was like some enormous
+juicy fruit waiting for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large
+enough to give her avidity the sense of enough.  She felt it waiting
+for her, household, servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly
+delight of buying and possessing things, the opera, first-nights,
+picture exhibitions, great dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties,
+crowds seen from a point of vantage, the carriage in a long string
+of fine carriages with the lamplit multitude peering, Amanda in a
+thousand bright settings, in a thousand various dresses.  She had
+had love; it had been glorious, it was still glorious, but her love-
+making became now at times almost perfunctory in the contemplation
+of these approaching delights and splendours and excitements.
+
+She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in Benham's head; but she
+was a realist.  She did not see why ideas should stand in the way of
+a career.  Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind.  One
+talks ideas, but THE THING THAT IS, IS THE THING THAT IS.  And
+though she believed that Benham had a certain strength of character
+of his own, she had that sort of confidence in his love for her and
+in the power of her endearments that has in it the assurance of a
+faint contempt.  She had mingled pride and sense in the glorious
+realization of the power over him that her wit and beauty gave her.
+She had held him faint with her divinity, intoxicated with the pride
+of her complete possession, and she did not dream that the moment
+when he should see clearly that she could deliberately use these
+ultimate delights to rule and influence him, would be the end of
+their splendour and her power.  Her nature, which was just a nest of
+vigorous appetites, was incapable of suspecting his gathering
+disillusionment until it burst upon her.
+
+Now with her attention set upon London ahead he could observe her.
+In the beginning he had never seemed to be observing her at all,
+they dazzled one another; it seemed extraordinary now to him to note
+how much he had been able to disregard.  There were countless times
+still when he would have dropped his observation and resumed that
+mutual exaltation very gladly, but always now other things possessed
+her mind. . . .
+
+There was still an immense pleasure for him in her vigour; there was
+something delightful in her pounce, even when she was pouncing on
+things superficial, vulgar or destructive.  She made him understand
+and share the excitement of a big night at the opera, the glitter
+and prettiness of a smart restaurant, the clustering little acute
+adventures of a great reception of gay people, just as she had
+already made him understand and sympathize with dogs.  She picked up
+the art world where he had laid it down, and she forced him to feel
+dense and slow before he rebelled against her multitudinous
+enthusiasms and admirations.  South Harting had had its little group
+of artistic people; it is not one of your sleepy villages, and she
+slipped back at once into the movement.  Those were the great days
+of John, the days before the Post Impressionist outbreak.  John,
+Orpen, Tonks, she bought them with vigour.  Artistic circles began
+to revolve about her.  Very rapidly she was in possession. . . .
+And among other desirable things she had, it seemed, pounced upon
+and captured Lady Marayne.
+
+At any rate it was clear that that awful hostile silence and
+aloofness was to end.  Benham never quite mastered how it was done.
+But Amanda had gone in one morning to Desborough Street, very
+sweetly and chastely dressed, had abased herself and announced a
+possible (though subsequently disproved) grandchild.  And she had
+appreciated the little lady so highly and openly, she had so
+instantly caught and reproduced her tone, that her success, though
+only temporary in its completeness, was immediate.  In the afternoon
+Benham was amazed by the apparition of his mother amidst the
+scattered unsettled furnishings of the new home Amanda had chosen in
+Lancaster Gate.  He was in the hall, the door stood open awaiting
+packing-cases from a van without.  In the open doorway she shone,
+looking the smallest of dainty things.  There was no effect of her
+coming but only of her having arrived there, as a little blue
+butterfly will suddenly alight on a flower.
+
+"Well, Poff!" said Lady Marayne, ignoring abysses, "What are you up
+to now, Poff?  Come and embrace me. . . ."
+
+"No, not so," she said, "stiffest of sons. . . ."
+
+She laid hold of his ears in the old fashion and kissed one eye.
+
+"Congratulations, dear little Poff.  Oh! congratulations!  In heaps.
+I'm so GLAD."
+
+Now what was that for?
+
+And then Amanda came out upon the landing upstairs, saw the
+encounter with an involuntary cry of joy, and came downstairs with
+arms wide open.  It was the first intimation he had of their
+previous meeting.  He was for some minutes a stunned, entirely
+inadequate Benham. . . .
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a few people in the
+Hampstead Garden suburb that she had not the slightest wish to know,
+and then very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of people.  The
+artistic circle brought in people, Lady Marayne brought in people;
+they spread.  It was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young
+couple; he would certainly do something considerable presently, and
+she was bright and daring, jolly to look at and excellent fun, and,
+when you came to talk to her, astonishingly well informed.  They
+passed from one hostess's hand to another: they reciprocated.  The
+Clynes people and the Rushtones took her up; Mr. Evesham was amused
+by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed her charm like a trumpet, the
+Young Liberal people made jealous advances, Lord Moggeridge found
+she listened well, she lit one of the brightest weekend parties Lady
+Marayne had ever gathered at Chexington.  And her descriptions of
+recent danger and adventure in Albania not only entertained her
+hearers but gave her just that flavour of personal courage which
+completes the fascination of a young woman.  People in the gaps of a
+halting dinner-table conversation would ask: "Have you met Mrs.
+Benham?"
+
+Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking.  A smiling and successful
+young woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl
+with a good lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely
+engaged, or at least friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr.
+Rathbone-Sanders, may be forgiven if in the full tide of her success
+she does not altogether grasp the intention of her husband's
+discourse.  It seemed to her that he was obsessed by a
+responsibility for civilization and the idea that he was
+aristocratic.  (Secretly she was inclined to doubt whether he was
+justified in calling himself aristocratic; at the best his mother
+was county-stuff; but still if he did there was no great harm in it
+nowadays.)  Clearly his line was Tory-Democracy, social reform
+through the House of Lords and friendly intimacy with the more
+spirited young peers.  And it was only very slowly and reluctantly
+that she was forced to abandon this satisfactory solution of his
+problem.  She reproduced all the equipment and comforts of his
+Finacue Street study in their new home, she declared constantly that
+she would rather forego any old social thing than interfere with his
+work, she never made him go anywhere with her without first asking
+if his work permitted it.  To relieve him of the burthen of such
+social attentions she even made a fag or so.  The making of fags out
+of manifestly stricken men, the keeping of tamed and hopeless
+admirers, seemed to her to be the most natural and reasonable of
+feminine privileges.  They did their useful little services until it
+pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own.  That was how she put
+it. . . .
+
+But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
+ignored.  He was manifestly losing his temper with her.  There was a
+novel austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face
+on certain occasions that lingered in her memory.
+
+He was indeed making elaborate explanations.  He said that what he
+wanted to do was to understand "the collective life of the world,"
+and that this was not to be done in a West-End study.  He had an
+extraordinary contempt, it seemed, for both sides in the drama of
+British politics.  He had extravagant ideas of beginning in some
+much more fundamental way.  He wanted to understand this "collective
+life of the world," because ultimately he wanted to help control it.
+(Was there ever such nonsense?)  The practical side of this was
+serious enough, however; he was back at his old idea of going round
+the earth.  Later on that might be rather a jolly thing to do, but
+not until they had struck root a little more surely in London.
+
+And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she
+began to realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon
+this vague extravagant research, that all this work she had been
+doing to make a social place for him in London was as nothing to
+him, that he was thinking of himself as separable from her. . . .
+
+"But, Cheetah!  How can you leave your spotless leopard?  You would
+howl in the lonely jungle!"
+
+"Possibly I shall.  But I am going."
+
+"Then I shall come."
+
+"No." He considered her reasons.  "You see you are not interested."
+
+"But I am."
+
+"Not as I am.  You would turn it all into a jolly holiday.  You
+don't want to see things as I want to do.  You want romance.  All
+the world is a show for you.  As a show I can't endure it.  I want
+to lay hands on it."
+
+"But, Cheetah!" she said, "this is separation."
+
+"You will have your life here.  And I shall come back."
+
+"But, Cheetah!  How can we be separated?"
+
+"We are separated," he said.
+
+Her eyes became round with astonishment.  Then her face puckered.
+
+"Cheetah!" she cried in a voice of soft distress, "I love you.  What
+do you mean?"
+
+And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and
+shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms. . . .
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+"Don't say we are separated," she whispered, putting her still wet
+face close to his.
+
+"No.  We're mates," he answered softly, with his arm about her.
+
+"How could we ever keep away from each uvver?" she whispered.
+
+He was silent.
+
+"How COULD we?"
+
+He answered aloud.  "Amanda," he said, "I mean to go round the
+world."
+
+She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.
+
+"What is to become of me," she asked suddenly in a voice of despair,
+"while you go round the world?  If you desert me in London," she
+said, "if you shame me by deserting me in London--  If you leave me,
+I will never forgive you, Cheetah!  Never."  Then in an almost
+breathless voice, and as if she spoke to herself, "Never in all my
+days."
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children.  There
+was nothing involuntary about Amanda.  "Soon," she said, "we must
+begin to think of children.  Not just now, but a little later.  It's
+good to travel and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are
+children in the background.  No woman is really content until she is
+a mother. . . ."  And for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said
+about that solitary journey round the world.
+
+But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk.  She set
+herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there
+were other men in the world.  The convenient fags, sometimes a
+little embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought
+into the light before Benham's eyes.  Most of them were much older
+men than himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no
+sane man need be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a
+contemporary, Sir Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood
+and a suggestion of Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much
+in love with Amanda and of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible
+difference of manner that made Benham faintly uneasy.  He was
+ashamed of the feeling.  Easton it seemed was a man of a peculiarly
+fine honour, so that Amanda could trust herself with him to an
+extent that would have been inadvisable with men of a commoner
+substance, and he had a gift of understanding and sympathy that was
+almost feminine; he could cheer one up when one was lonely and
+despondent.  For Amanda was so methodical in the arrangement of her
+time that even in the full rush of a London season she could find an
+hour now and then for being lonely and despondent.  And he was a
+liberal and understanding purchaser of the ascendant painters; he
+understood that side of Amanda's interests, a side upon which Benham
+was notably deficient. . . .
+
+"Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?--Sir
+Philip Easton?" said Lady Marayne.
+
+Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said
+nothing.
+
+"When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her," said Lady Marayne.
+
+"No," said Benham after consideration.  "I don't intend to be a
+wife-herd."
+
+"What?"
+
+"Wife-herd--same as goat-herd."
+
+"Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff--nowadays."
+
+"It's exactly what I mean.  I can understand the kind of curator's
+interest an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but
+to spend my days looking after one person who ought to be able to
+look after herself--"
+
+"She's very young."
+
+"She's quite grown up.  Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid."
+
+"If you leave her about and go abroad--"
+
+"Has she been talking to you, mother?"
+
+"The thing shows."
+
+"But about my going abroad?"
+
+"She said something, my little Poff."
+
+Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference
+was something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking
+inordinately.  He weighed his words before he spoke again.  "If
+Amanda chooses to threaten me with a sort of conditional infidelity,
+I don't see that it ought to change the plans I have made for my
+life. . . ."
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+"No aristocrat has any right to be jealous," Benham wrote.  "If he
+chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or
+naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to
+compel her to go his way.  What is the use of dragging an unwilling
+companion through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends?
+What is the use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no
+inherent will to seek and live the aristocratic life?
+
+"But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call. . . ."
+
+He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
+Already he had thought out and judged Amanda.  The very charm of
+her, the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him
+more grimly resolute to break away.  All the elaborate process of
+thinking her over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while
+she had been preoccupied with her housing and establishment in
+London; it was with a sense of extraordinary injustice, of having
+had a march stolen upon her, of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda
+found herself faced by foregone conclusions.  He was ready now even
+with the details of his project.  She should go on with her life in
+London exactly as she had planned it.  He would take fifteen hundred
+a year for himself and all the rest she might spend without check or
+stint as it pleased her.  He was going round the world for one or
+two years.  It was even possible he would not go alone.  There was a
+man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don called
+Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out his
+ideas. . . .
+
+To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things
+should happen.
+
+She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily
+told her that this only hardened his heart.  She perceived that she
+must make a softer appeal.  Now of a set intention she began to
+revive and imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she
+perceived for the first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing
+it is for a woman to bear a child.  "He cannot go if I am going to
+have a child," she told herself.  But that would mean illness, and
+for illness in herself or others Amanda had the intense disgust
+natural to her youth.  Yet even illness would be better than this
+intolerable publication of her husband's ability to leave her
+side. . . .
+
+She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself
+forthwith to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate
+it to him.  Her dread of illness disappeared; her desire for
+offspring grew.
+
+"Yes," he said, "I want to have children, but I must go round the
+world none the less."
+
+She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind.
+She argued with persistence and repetition.  And then suddenly so
+that she was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she
+ceased to argue.
+
+She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and
+she was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-
+forgetful; she was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale
+green, that set off her slim erect body and the strong clear lines
+of her neck and shoulders very beautifully, some greenish stones
+caught a light from without and flashed soft whispering gleams from
+amidst the misty darkness of her hair.  She was going to Lady
+Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for a dinner at the House
+with some young Liberals at which he was to meet two representative
+Indians with a grievance from Bengal.  Husband and wife had but a
+few moments together.  She asked about his company and he told her.
+
+"They will tell you about India."
+
+"Yes."
+
+She stood for a moment looking out across the lights and the dark
+green trees, and then she turned to him.
+
+"Why cannot I come with you?" she asked with sudden passion.  "Why
+cannot I see the things you want to see?"
+
+"I tell you you are not interested.  You would only be interested
+through me.  That would not help me.  I should just be dealing out
+my premature ideas to you.  If you cared as I care, if you wanted to
+know as I want to know, it would be different.  But you don't.  It
+isn't your fault that you don't.  It happens so.  And there is no
+good in forced interest, in prescribed discovery."
+
+"Cheetah," she asked, "what is it that you want to know--that I
+don't care for?"
+
+"I want to know about the world.  I want to rule the world."
+
+"So do I."
+
+"No, you want to have the world."
+
+"Isn't it the same?"
+
+"No.  You're a greedier thing than I am, you Black Leopard you--
+standing there in the dusk.  You're a stronger thing.  Don't you
+know you're stronger?  When I am with you, you carry your point,
+because you are more concentrated, more definite, less scrupulous.
+When you run beside me you push me out of my path. . . .  You've
+made me afraid of you. . . .  And so I won't go with you, Leopard.
+I go alone.  It isn't because I don't love you.  I love you too
+well.  It isn't because you aren't beautiful and wonderful. . . ."
+
+"But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for this that you want
+than you care for me."
+
+Benham thought of it.  "I suppose I do," he said.
+
+"What is it that you want?  Still I don't understand."
+
+Her voice had the break of one who would keep reasonable in spite of
+pain.
+
+"I ought to tell you."
+
+"Yes, you ought to tell me."
+
+"I wonder if I can tell you," he said very thoughtfully, and rested
+his hands on his hips.  "I shall seem ridiculous to you."
+
+"You ought to tell me."
+
+"I think what I want is to be king of the world."
+
+She stood quite still staring at him.
+
+"I do not know how I can tell you of it.  Amanda, do you remember
+those bodies--you saw those bodies--those mutilated men?"
+
+"I saw them," said Amanda.
+
+"Well.  Is it nothing to you that those things happen?"
+
+"They must happen."
+
+"No.  They happen because there are no kings but pitiful kings.
+They happen because the kings love their Amandas and do not care."
+
+"But what can YOU do, Cheetah?"
+
+"Very little.  But I can give my life and all my strength.  I can
+give all I can give."
+
+"But how?  How can you help it--help things like that massacre?"
+
+"I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong with my world and rule
+it and set it right."
+
+"YOU!  Alone."
+
+"Other men do as much.  Every one who does so helps others to do so.
+You see-- . . .  In this world one may wake in the night and one may
+resolve to be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king.
+Does that sound foolishness to you?  Anyhow, it's fair that I should
+tell you, though you count me a fool.  This--this kingship--this
+dream of the night--is my life.  It is the very core of me.  Much
+more than you are.  More than anything else can be.  I mean to be a
+king in this earth.  KING.  I'm not mad. . . .  I see the world
+staggering from misery to misery and there is little wisdom, less
+rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things come by chance
+and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my world and I
+am responsible.  Every man to whom this light has come is
+responsible.  As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your
+kingship is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no
+delight, except in work, in service, in utmost effort.  As far as I
+can do it I will rule my world.  I cannot abide in this smug city, I
+cannot endure its self-complacency, its routine, its gloss of
+success, its rottenness. . . .  I shall do little, perhaps I shall
+do nothing, but what I can understand and what I can do I will do.
+Think of that wild beautiful country we saw, and the mean misery,
+the filth and the warring cruelty of the life that lives there,
+tragedy, tragedy without dignity; and think, too, of the limitless
+ugliness here, and of Russia slipping from disorder to massacre, and
+China, that sea of human beings, sliding steadily to disaster.  Do
+you think these are only things in the newspapers?  To me at any
+rate they are not things in newspapers; they are pain and failure,
+they are torment, they are blood and dust and misery.  They haunt me
+day and night.  Even if it is utterly absurd I will still do my
+utmost.  It IS absurd.  I'm a madman and you and my mother are
+sensible people. . . .  And I will go my way. . . .  I don't care
+for the absurdity.  I don't care a rap."
+
+He stopped abruptly.
+
+"There you have it, Amanda.  It's rant, perhaps.  Sometimes I feel
+it's rant.  And yet it's the breath of life to me. . . .  There you
+are. . . .  At last I've been able to break silence and tell
+you. . . ."
+
+He stopped with something like a sob and stood regarding the dusky
+mystery of her face.  She stood quite still, she was just a
+beautiful outline in the twilight, her face was an indistinctness
+under the black shadow of her hair, with eyes that were two patches
+of darkness.
+
+He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the
+time.  His voice changed.  "Well--if you provoke a man enough, you
+see he makes speeches.  Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda.  Here we
+are talking instead of going to our dinners.  The car has been
+waiting ten minutes."
+
+Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas. . . .
+
+A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly.  In an instant
+she had ceased to plot against him.  A vast wave of emotion swept
+her forward to a resolution that astonished her.
+
+"Cheetah!" she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed,
+"give me one thing.  Stay until June with me."
+
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.
+
+"Because--now--no, I don't want to keep you any more--I am not
+trying to hold you any more. . . .  I want. . . ."
+
+She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.
+
+"Cheetah," she whispered almost inaudibly, "Cheetah--I didn't
+understand.  But now--.  I want to bear your child."
+
+He was astonished.  "Old Leopard!" he said.
+
+"No," she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing
+very close to him, "Queen---if I can be--to your King."
+
+"You want to bear me a child!" he whispered, profoundly moved.
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of
+Commons came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer.  And over
+against Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of
+those men who know that their judgments are quoted.
+
+"Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?" he asked
+of his neighbour in confidential undertones. . . .
+
+He tittered.  "I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY
+aware that the man to her left is talking to her. . . ."
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was
+now a fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer. . . .
+
+All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in
+some way Prothero was necessary to his mind.  It was as if he looked
+to Prothero to keep him real.  He suspected even while he obeyed
+that upward flourish which was his own essential characteristic.  He
+had a peculiar feeling that somehow that upward bias would betray
+him; that from exaltation he might presently float off, into the
+higher, the better, and so to complete unreality.  He fled from
+priggishness and the terror of such sublimity alike to Prothero.
+Moreover, in relation to so many things Prothero in a peculiar
+distinctive manner SAW.  He had less self-control than Benham, less
+integrity of purpose, less concentration, and things that were
+before his eyes were by the very virtue of these defects invariably
+visible to him.  Things were able to insist upon themselves with
+him.  Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted his purpose
+too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them.  He repudiated
+inconvenient facts.  He mastered and made his world; Prothero
+accepted and recorded his.  Benham was a will towards the universe
+where Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive
+activity.  And it was because of his realization of this profound
+difference between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking
+Prothero with him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision--
+rather like that eye the Graiae used to hand one another. . . .
+
+After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms
+in Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-
+soaked blue sky, seemed cool and quiet.  A flavour of scholarship
+pervaded them--a little blended with the flavour of innumerable
+breakfasts nearly but not completely forgotten.  Prothero's door had
+been locked against the world, and he had appeared after a slight
+delay looking a little puffy and only apprehending who his visitor
+was after a resentful stare for the better part of a second.  He
+might have been asleep, he might have been doing anything but the
+examination papers he appeared to be doing.  The two men exchanged
+personal details; they had not met since some months before Benham'
+s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host to
+the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects
+of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch,
+the distinctive Prothero flavour.  Then his eye was caught by a
+large red, incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch
+that had an air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE,
+its cover proclaimed. . . .
+
+His host followed that glance and blushed.  "They send me all sorts
+of inappropriate stuff to review," he remarked.
+
+And then he was denouncing celibacy.
+
+The transition wasn't very clear to Benham.  His mind had been
+preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project.
+Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between
+his teeth and bolted.  He began to say the most shocking things
+right away, so that Benham's attention was caught in spite of
+himself.
+
+"Inflammatory classics."
+
+"What's that?"
+
+"Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me," said Prothero.  "I
+can't stand it any longer."
+
+It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world,
+such a statement might have been credible.  Even in his own life,--
+it was now indeed a remote, forgotten stage--there had been
+something distantly akin. . . .
+
+"You're going to marry?"
+
+"I must."
+
+"Who's the lady, Billy?"
+
+"I don't know.  Venus."
+
+His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly.  "So far as I
+know, it is Venus Anadyomene."  A flash of laughter passed across
+his face and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant.
+"I like her best, anyhow.  I do, indeed.  But, Lord!  I feel that
+almost any of them--"
+
+"Tut, tut!" said Benham.
+
+Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.
+
+"Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face?
+I am not pronouncing an immoral principle.  Your manner suggests I
+am.  I am telling you exactly how I feel.  That is how I feel.  I
+want--Venus.  I don't want her to talk to or anything of that
+sort. . . .  I have been studying that book, yes, that large,
+vulgar, red book, all the morning, instead of doing any work.
+Would you like to see it? . . .  NO! . . .
+
+"This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad.  It is a
+peculiarly erotic spring.  I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I
+cannot attend to ordinary conversation.  These feelings, I
+understand, are by no means peculiar to myself. . . .  No, don't
+interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now that the spirit of speech is
+upon me.  When you came in you said, 'How are you?'  I am telling
+you how I am.  You brought it on yourself.  Well--I am--inflamed.  I
+have no strong moral or religious convictions to assist me either to
+endure or deny this--this urgency.  And so why should I deny it?
+It's one of our chief problems here.  The majority of my fellow dons
+who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and
+combination-room are in just the same case as myself.  The fever in
+oneself detects the fever in others.  I know their hidden thoughts.
+Their fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts.  Each
+covers his miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly
+indifference.  A tattered cloak. . . .  Each tries to hide his
+abandonment to this horrible vice of continence--"
+
+"Billy, what's the matter with you?"
+
+Prothero grimaced impatience.  "Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a
+humbug, Benham?" he screamed, and in screaming became calmer.
+"Nature taunts me, maddens me.  My life is becoming a hell of shame.
+'Get out from all these books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.'
+The Flesh, Benham.  Yes--I insist--the Flesh.  Do I look like a pure
+spirit?  Is any man a pure spirit?  And here am I at Cambridge like
+a lark in a cage, with too much port and no Aspasia.  Not that I
+should have liked Aspasia."
+
+"Mutual, perhaps, Billy."
+
+"Oh! you can sneer!"
+
+"Well, clearly--Saint Paul is my authority--it's marriage, Billy."
+
+Prothero had walked to the window.  He turned round.
+
+"I CAN'T marry," he said.  "The trouble has gone too far.  I've lost
+my nerve in the presence of women.  I don't like them any more.
+They come at one--done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and
+chattering about all sorts of things that don't matter. . . ."  He
+surveyed his friend's thoughtful attitude.  "I'm getting to hate
+women, Benham.  I'm beginning now to understand the bitterness of
+spinsters against men.  I'm beginning to grasp the unkindliness of
+priests.  The perpetual denial.  To you, happily married, a woman is
+just a human being.  You can talk to her, like her, you can even
+admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge against her. . . ."
+
+He sat down abruptly.
+
+Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered
+him.
+
+"Billy! this is delusion," he said.  "What's come over you?"
+
+"I'm telling you," said Prothero.
+
+"No," said Benham.
+
+Prothero awaited some further utterance.
+
+"I'm looking for the cause of it.  It's feeding, Billy.  It's port
+and stimulants where there is no scope for action.  It's idleness.
+I begin to see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser."
+
+"Idleness!  Look at this pile of examination answers.  Look at that
+filing system like an arsenal of wisdom.  Useless wisdom, I admit,
+but anyhow not idleness."
+
+"There's still bodily idleness.  No.  That's your trouble.  You're
+stuffy.  You've enlarged your liver.  You sit in this room of a warm
+morning after an extravagant breakfast--.  And peep and covet."
+
+"Just eggs and bacon!"
+
+"Think of it!  Coffee and toast it ought to be.  Come out of it,
+Billy, and get aired."
+
+"How can one?"
+
+"Easily.  Come out of it now.  Come for a walk, you Pig!"
+
+"It's an infernally warm morning.
+
+"Walk with me to Grantchester."
+
+"We might go by boat.  You could row."
+
+"WALK."
+
+"I ought to do these papers."
+
+"You weren't doing them."
+
+"No. . . ."
+
+"Walk with me to Grantchester.  All this affliction of yours is--
+horrid--and just nothing at all.  Come out of it!  I want you to
+come with me to Russia and about the world.  I'm going to leave my
+wife--"
+
+"Leave your wife!"
+
+"Why not?  And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and
+instead you are in this disgusting state.  I've never met anything
+in my life so hot and red and shiny and shameless.  Come out of it,
+man!  How can one talk to you?"
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+"You pull things down to your own level," said Benham as they went
+through the heat to Grantchester.
+
+"I pull them down to truth," panted Prothero.
+
+"Truth!  As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and
+discipline and training some sort of falsity!"
+
+"Artificiality.  And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's
+pride."
+
+For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them. . . .
+
+The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the
+background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
+
+"I'm not talking of Love," he said, remaining persistently
+outrageous.  "I'm talking of physical needs.  That first.  What is
+the good of arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you
+know what is physically possible. . . .
+
+"But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?"
+
+"Then why don't we up and find out?" said Billy.
+
+He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that
+surrounded these questions.  We didn't worship our ancestors when it
+came to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or
+studying our indigestion, and why should we become breathless or
+wordless with awe and terror when it came to this fundamental
+affair?  Why here in particular should we give way to Holy Fear and
+stifled submission to traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the
+ages?  "What is the wisdom of the ages?" said Prothero.  "Think of
+the corners where that wisdom was born. . . .  Flea-bitten sages in
+stone-age hovels. . . .  Wandering wise man with a rolling eye, a
+fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic. . . ."
+
+"Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?" protested Benham.
+
+The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter
+experience.  Most of it was better forgotten.  It didn't convince.
+It had never worked things out.  In this matter just as in every
+other matter that really signified things had still to be worked
+out.  Nothing had been worked out hitherto.  The wisdom of the ages
+was a Cant.  People had been too busy quarrelling, fighting and
+running away.  There wasn't any digested experience of the ages at
+all.  Only the mis-remembered hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man.
+
+"Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or
+isn't it?" Prothero demanded.  "There's a simple question enough,
+and is there anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages
+to tell me yes or no?  Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and
+vigorous as a mated man?  Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy
+human being?  Can she be?  I don't believe so.  Then why in thunder
+do we let her be?  Here am I at a centre of learning and wisdom and
+I don't believe so; and there is nothing in all our colleges,
+libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here, to settle that plain
+question for me, plainly and finally.  My life is a grubby torment
+of cravings because it isn't settled.  If sexual activity IS a part
+of the balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set about
+making it accessible and harmless and have done with it.  Swedish
+exercises.  That sort of thing.  If it isn't, if it can be reduced
+and done without, then let us set about teaching people HOW to
+control themselves and reduce and get rid of this vehement passion.
+But all this muffled mystery, this pompous sneak's way we take with
+it!"
+
+"But, Billy!  How can one settle these things?  It's a matter of
+idiosyncrasy.  What is true for one man isn't true for another.
+There's infinite difference of temperaments!"
+
+"Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral
+code for each sort?  Why am I ruled by the way of life that is
+convenient for Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like
+a glove?  It isn't convenient for me.  It fits me like a hair-shirt.
+Of course there are temperaments, but why can't we formulate them
+and exercise the elementary charity of recognizing that one man's
+health in these matters is another man's death?  Some want love and
+gratification and some don't.  There are people who want children
+and people who don't want to be bothered by children but who are
+full of vivid desires.  There are people whose only happiness is
+chastity, and women who would rather be courtesans than mothers.
+Some of us would concentrate upon a single passion or a single idea;
+others overflow with a miscellaneous--tenderness.  Yes,--and you
+smile!  Why spit upon and insult a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham?
+Why grin at it?  Why try every one by the standards that suit
+oneself?  We're savages, Benham, shamefaced savages, still.
+Shamefaced and persecuting.
+
+"I was angry about sex by seventeen," he went on.  "Every year I
+live I grow angrier."
+
+His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
+
+"Think," he said, "of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex
+that is going on in Cambridge this morning.  The hundreds out of
+these thousands full of it.  A vast tank of cerebration.  And we put
+none of it together; we work nothing out from that but poor little
+couplings and casual stories, patchings up of situations,
+misbehaviours, blunders, disease, trouble, escapes; and the next
+generation will start, and the next generation after that will start
+with nothing but your wisdom of the ages, which isn't wisdom at all,
+which is just awe and funk, taboos and mystery and the secretive
+cunning of the savage. . . .
+
+"What I really want to do is my work," said Prothero, going off
+quite unexpectedly again.  "That is why all this business, this
+incessant craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally
+angry. . . ."
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+"There I'm with you," cried Benham, struggling out of the thick
+torrent of Prothero's prepossessions.  "What we want to do is our
+work."
+
+He clung to his idea.  He raised his voice to prevent Prothero
+getting the word again.
+
+"It's this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--
+living the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity
+out of this business.  If it was only submission. . . .  YOU think
+it is only submission--giving way. . . .  It isn't only submission.
+We'd manage sex all right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would
+make us, if we didn't know all the time that there was something
+else to live for, something far more important.  And different.
+Absolutely different and contradictory.  So different that it cuts
+right across all these considerations.  It won't fit in. . . .  I
+don't know what this other thing is; it's what I want to talk about
+with you.  But I know that it IS, in all my bones. . . .  YOU
+know. . . .  It demands control, it demands continence, it insists
+upon disregard."
+
+But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to
+Prothero that day.
+
+"Mankind," said Benham, "is overcharged with this sex.  It
+suffocates us.  It gives life only to consume it.  We struggle out
+of the urgent necessities of a mere animal existence.  We are not so
+much living as being married and given in marriage.  All life is
+swamped in the love story. . . ."
+
+"Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied," said Prothero,
+sticking stoutly to his own view.
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at
+Grantchester after their lunch that Benham could make head against
+Prothero and recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily
+touched the imagination of Amanda.  And then he did not so much
+dispose of Prothero's troubles as soar over them.  It is the last
+triumph of the human understanding to sympathize with desires we do
+not share, and to Benham who now believed himself to be loved beyond
+the chances of life, who was satisfied and tranquil and austerely
+content, it was impossible that Prothero's demands should seem
+anything more than the grotesque and squalid squealings of the beast
+that has to be overridden and rejected altogether.  It is a freakish
+fact of our composition that these most intense feelings in life are
+just those that are most rapidly and completely forgotten; hate one
+may recall for years, but the magic of love and the flame of desire
+serve their purpose in our lives and vanish, leaving no trace, like
+the snows of Venice.  Benham was still not a year and a half from
+the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale, and he looked at
+Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its sty. . . .
+
+What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia.  When at last
+he could sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the
+project that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon
+experience.
+
+He had discovered a new reason for travelling.  The last country we
+can see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country.  It is as
+hard to see one's own country as it is to see the back of one's
+head.  It is too much behind us, too much ourselves.  But Russia is
+like England with everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt
+that directly one walked about St. Petersburg.  St. Petersburg upon
+its Neva was like a savage untamed London on a larger Thames; they
+were seagull-haunted tidal cities, like no other capitals in Europe.
+The shipping and buildings mingled in their effects.  Like London it
+looked over the heads of its own people to a limitless polyglot
+empire.  And Russia was an aristocratic land, with a middle-class
+that had no pride in itself as a class; it had a British toughness
+and incompetence, a British disregard of logic and meticulous care.
+Russia, like England, was outside Catholic Christendom, it had a
+state church and the opposition to that church was not secularism
+but dissent.  One could draw a score of such contrasted parallels.
+And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid bare the
+elemental facts of a great social organization.  It was having its
+South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a
+certain defeat instead of a dubious victory. . . .
+
+"There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in
+England," said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.
+
+Benham went on with his discourse about Russia. . . .
+
+"At the college of Troitzka," said Prothero, "which I understand is
+a kind of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells
+me that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls,
+the arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various
+hotels are conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality."
+
+Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.
+
+He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian
+situation.  He led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see
+Russia, to try to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process,
+was the manifest duty of every responsible intelligence that was
+free to do as much.  And so he was going, and if Prothero cared to
+come too--
+
+"Yes," said Prothero, "I should like to go to Russia."
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was
+never able to lift Prothero away from his obsession.  It was the
+substance of their talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting
+destroyers and winking beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the
+smoothly undulating darkness of the North Sea; it rose upon them
+again as they sat over the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in
+the express for Berlin.  Prothero filled the Sieges Allee with his
+complaints against nature and society, and distracted Benham in his
+contemplation of Polish agriculture from the windows of the train
+with turgid sexual liberalism.  So that Benham, during this period
+until Prothero left him and until the tragic enormous spectacle of
+Russia in revolution took complete possession of him, was as it were
+thinking upon two floors.  Upon the one he was thinking of the vast
+problems of a society of a hundred million people staggering on the
+verge of anarchy, and upon the other he was perplexed by the
+feverish inattention of Prothero to the tremendous things that were
+going on all about them.  It was only presently when the serenity of
+his own private life began to be ruffled by disillusionment, that he
+began to realize the intimate connexion of these two systems of
+thought.  Yet Prothero put it to him plainly enough.
+
+"Inattentive," said Prothero, "of course I am inattentive.  What is
+really the matter with all this--this social mess people are in
+here, is that nearly everybody is inattentive.  These Big Things of
+yours, nobody is thinking of them really.  Everybody is thinking
+about the Near Things that concern himself."
+
+"The bombs they threw yesterday?  The Cossacks and the whips?"
+
+"Nudges.  Gestures of inattention.  If everybody was thinking of the
+Res Publica would there be any need for bombs?"
+
+He pursued his advantage.  "It's all nonsense to suppose people
+think of politics because they are in 'em.  As well suppose that the
+passengers on a liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war.
+Before men can think of to-morrow, they must think of to-day.
+Before they can think of others, they must be sure about themselves.
+First of all, food; the private, the personal economic worry.  Am I
+safe for food?  Then sex, and until one is tranquil and not ashamed,
+not irritated and dissatisfied, how can one care for other people,
+or for next year or the Order of the World?  How can one, Benham?"
+
+He seized the illustration at hand.  "Here we are in Warsaw--not a
+month after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging.  Windows have still
+to be mended, smashed doors restored.  There's blood-stains still on
+some of the houses.  There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and
+in the Ochrana prison.  This morning there were executions.  Is it
+anything more than an eddy in the real life of the place?  Watch the
+customers in the shops, the crowd in the streets, the men in the
+cafes who stare at the passing women.  They are all swallowed up
+again in their own business.  They just looked up as the Cossacks
+galloped past; they just shifted a bit when the bullets spat. . . ."
+
+And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing
+adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide
+of the private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him
+back to Cambridge--changed.
+
+Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
+disregard Prothero.  He was looking over him at the vast heaving
+trouble of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the
+hurrying darknesses of an approaching storm.  In those days it
+looked as though it must be an overwhelming storm.  He was drinking
+in the wide and massive Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the
+entangling streets, the houses with their strange lettering in black
+and gold, the innumerable barbaric churches, the wildly driven
+droshkys, the sombre red fortress of the Kremlin, with its bulbous
+churches clustering up into the sky, the crosses, the innumerable
+gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil, carrying the Russian note
+beyond the pitch of permissible caricature, and in this setting the
+obscure drama of clustering, staring, sash-wearing peasants, long-
+haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand varieties of uniform, a
+running and galloping to and fro of messengers, a flutter of little
+papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and portentous, a
+gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on to a
+perpetual clash and clamour of bells.  Benham had brought letters of
+introduction to a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed.
+They were "away," the porters said, and they continued to be
+"away,"--it was the formula, he learnt, for arrest; others were
+evasive, a few showed themselves extraordinarily anxious to inform
+him about things, to explain themselves and things about them
+exhaustively.  One young student took him to various meetings and
+showed him in great detail the scene of the recent murder of the
+Grand Duke Sergius.  The buildings opposite the old French cannons
+were still under repair.  "The assassin stood just here.  The bomb
+fell there, look! right down there towards the gate; that was where
+they found his arm.  He was torn to fragments.  He was scraped up.
+He was mixed with the horses. . . ."
+
+Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter
+of days or at the utmost weeks.  And whatever question Benham chose
+to ask these talkers were prepared to answer.  Except one.  "And
+after the revolution," he asked, "what then? . . ."  Then they waved
+their hands, and failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.
+
+He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous
+drift towards a conflict.  He was trying to piece together a
+process, if it was one and the same process, which involved riots in
+Lodz, fighting at Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal
+battlings in Manchuria, the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet
+lost somewhere now in the Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its
+fate, he was trying to rationalize it all in his mind, to comprehend
+its direction.  He was struggling strenuously with the obscurities
+of the language in which these things were being discussed about
+him, a most difficult language demanding new sets of visual images
+because of its strange alphabet.  Is it any wonder that for a time
+he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some entirely
+disconnected affair.
+
+They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre
+Square.  Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-
+looking men with peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's
+friends and guides to take him out and show him this and that.  At
+first Prothero always accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then
+he began to make excuses.  He would stay behind in the hotel.  Then
+when Benham returned Prothero would have disappeared.  When the
+porter was questioned about Prothero his nescience was profound.
+
+One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who
+wanted to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was
+alarmed.
+
+"Moscow is a late place," said Benham's student friend.  "You need
+not be anxious until after four or five in the morning.  It will be
+quite time--QUITE time to be anxious to-morrow.  He may be--close at
+hand."
+
+When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him
+sleepy and irritable.
+
+"I don't trouble if YOU are late," said Prothero, sitting up in his
+bed with a red resentful face and crumpled hair.  "I wasn't born
+yesterday."
+
+"I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow."
+
+"I don't want to leave Moscow."
+
+"But Odessa--Odessa is the centre of interest just now."
+
+"I want to stay in Moscow."
+
+Benham looked baffled.
+
+Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon
+them.  "I don't want to leave Moscow," he said, "and I'm not going
+to do so."
+
+"But haven't we done--"
+
+Prothero interrupted.  "You may.  But I haven't.  We're not after
+the same things.  Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest
+me.  I've found--different things."
+
+His expression was extraordinarily defiant.
+
+"I want," he went on, "to put our affairs on a different footing.
+Now you've opened the matter we may as well go into it.  You were
+good enough to bring me here. . . .  There was a sort of
+understanding we were working together. . . .  We aren't. . . .  The
+long and short of it is, Benham, I want to pay you for my journey
+here and go on my own--independently."
+
+His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly
+incredible in him.
+
+Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other
+matters jerked back into Benham's memory.  It popped back so
+suddenly that for an instant he wanted to laugh.  He turned towards
+the window, picked his way among Prothero's carelessly dropped
+garments, and stood for a moment staring into the square, with its
+drifting, assembling and dispersing fleet of trains and its long
+line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS.  Then he turned.
+
+"Billy," he said, "didn't I see you the other evening driving
+towards the Hermitage?"
+
+"Yes," said Prothero, and added, "that's it."
+
+"You were with a lady."
+
+"And she IS a lady," said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face
+twitched as though he was going to weep.
+
+"She's a Russian?"
+
+"She had an English mother.  Oh, you needn't stand there and look so
+damned ironical!  She's--she's a woman.  She's a thing of
+kindness. . . ."
+
+He was too full to go on.
+
+"Billy, old boy," said Benham, distressed, "I don't want to be
+ironical--"
+
+Prothero had got his voice again.
+
+"You'd better know," he said, "you'd better know.  She's one of
+those women who live in this hotel."
+
+"Live in this hotel!"
+
+"On the fourth floor.  Didn't you know?  It's the way in most of
+these big Russian hotels.  They come down and sit about after lunch
+and dinner.  A woman with a yellow ticket.  Oh!  I don't care.  I
+don't care a rap.  She's been kind to me; she's--she's dear to me.
+How are you to understand?  I shall stop in Moscow.  I shall take
+her to England.  I can't live without her, Benham.  And then--  And
+then you come worrying me to come to your damned Odessa!"
+
+And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face
+as though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an
+apoplectic moment burst noisily into tears.  They ran between his
+fingers.  "Get out of my room," he shouted, suffocatingly.  "What
+business have you to come prying on me?"
+
+Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared
+round-eyed at his friend.  His hands were in his pockets.  For a
+time he said nothing.
+
+"Billy," he began at last, and stopped again.  "Billy, in this
+country somehow one wants to talk like a Russian.  Billy, my dear--
+I'm not your father, I'm not your judge.  I'm--unreasonably fond of
+you.  It's not my business to settle what is right or wrong for you.
+If you want to stay in Moscow, stay in Moscow.  Stay here, and stay
+as my guest. . . ."
+
+He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.
+
+"I didn't know," said Prothero brokenly; "I didn't know it was
+possible to get so fond of a person. . . ."
+
+Benham stood up.  He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
+abominable in his life before.
+
+"I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy.  I'll make things all right here
+before I go. . . ."
+
+He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound
+thought to his own room. . . .
+
+Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to
+explain what so evidently did not need explaining.  He walked about
+the room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.
+
+In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to
+have shrunken to something sleek and small.
+
+"I wish," he said, "you could stay for a later train and have lunch
+and meet her.  She's not the ordinary thing.  She's--different."
+
+Benham plumbed depths of wisdom.  "Billy," he said, "no woman IS the
+ordinary thing.  They are all--different. . . ."
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as
+disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any
+matter to be.  While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and
+travelled hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in
+the endless tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia,
+Prothero was lost to all those large issues in the development of
+his personal situation.  He contributed nothing to Benham's thought
+except attempts at discouragement.  He reiterated his declaration
+that all the vast stress and change of Russian national life was
+going on because it was universally disregarded.  "I tell you, as I
+told you before, that nobody is attending.  You think because all
+Moscow, all Russia, is in the picture, that everybody is concerned.
+Nobody is concerned.  Nobody cares what is happening.  Even the men
+who write in newspapers and talk at meetings about it don't care.
+They are thinking of their dinners, of their clothes, of their
+money, of their wives.  They hurry home. . . ."
+
+That was his excuse.
+
+Manifestly it was an excuse.
+
+His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy
+and divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible.
+To Benham in those days everything was very simple in this business
+of love.  The aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all.  He had
+to love Amanda.  He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again,
+more in love, he felt, than they had ever been before.  They were
+now writing love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation
+that was almost voluptuous.  She found in the epistolatory treatment
+of her surrender to him and to the natural fate of women, a
+delightful exercise for her very considerable powers of expression.
+Life pointed now wonderfully to the great time ahead when there
+would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and meanwhile the Cheetah loped
+about the wild world upon a mighty quest.  In such terms she put it.
+Such foolishness written in her invincibly square and youthful hand
+went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up against his return
+in the porter's office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or pursued him down
+through the jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or waited for
+him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his journeyings
+wastefully or in several instances went altogether astray.  Perhaps
+they supplied self-educating young strikers in the postal service
+with useful exercises in the deciphering of manuscript English.  He
+wrote back five hundred different ways of saying that he loved her
+extravagantly. . . .
+
+It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and
+solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world;
+Heroic Love to its highest note--and then you go about your
+business.  It seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin
+high and diffuse a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate
+multitudes who stewed in affliction and hate because they had failed
+as yet to find this simple, culminating elucidation.  And Prothero--
+Prothero, too, was now achieving the same grand elementariness, out
+of his lusts and protests and general physical squalor he had
+flowered into love.  For a time it is true it made rather an
+ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere goose-stepping
+for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay exaltation.  Benham
+had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this Anglo-Russian, who was
+a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had seen her for a
+doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him, and his
+impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with dusky
+hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her, a
+quiet alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda.  And
+if she liked old Prothero--  And, indeed, she must like old Prothero
+or could she possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?
+
+They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero's soul
+would wake up and face the world again.  What did it matter what she
+had been?
+
+Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained
+anxiety and the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering
+towards revolution, Benham went with his own love like a lamp within
+him and this affair of Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was
+quite prepared for the most sympathetic and liberal behaviour when
+he came back to Moscow to make the lady's acquaintance.  He intended
+to help Prothero to marry and take her back to Cambridge, and to
+assist by every possible means in destroying and forgetting the
+official yellow ticket that defined her status in Moscow.  But he
+reckoned without either Prothero or the young lady in this
+expectation.
+
+It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations that
+there were obscure obstacles to this manifest course.  Prothero
+hesitated; the lady expressed doubts.
+
+On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished.  It was
+chiefly a similarity of complexion.  She had a more delicate face
+than Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none
+of Amanda's glow, and she spoke her mother's language with a pretty
+halting limp that was very different from Amanda's clear decisions.
+
+She put her case compactly.
+
+"I would not DO in Cambridge," she said with an infinitesimal glance
+at Prothero.
+
+"Mr. Benham," she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman of
+affairs, "now do you see me in Cambridge?  Now do you see me?  Kept
+outside the walls?  In a little DATCHA?  With no occupation?  Just
+to amuse him."
+
+And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved
+still completer lucidity.
+
+"I would come if I thought he wanted me to come," she said.  "But
+you see if I came he would not want me to come.  Because then he
+would have me and so he wouldn't want me.  He would just have the
+trouble.  And I am not sure if I should be happy in Cambridge.  I am
+not sure I should be happy enough to make him happy.  It is a very
+learned and intelligent and charming society, of course; but here,
+THINGS HAPPEN.  At Cambridge nothing happens--there is only
+education.  There is no revolution in Cambridge; there are not even
+sinful people to be sorry for. . . .  And he says himself that
+Cambridge people are particular.  He says they are liberal but very,
+very particular, and perhaps I could not always act my part well.
+Sometimes I am not always well behaved.  When there is music I
+behave badly sometimes, or when I am bored.  He says the Cambridge
+people are so liberal that they do not mind what you are, but he
+says they are so particular that they mind dreadfully how you are
+what you are. . . .  So that it comes to exactly the same
+thing. . . ."
+
+"Anna Alexievna," said Benham suddenly, "are you in love with
+Prothero?"
+
+Her manner became conscientiously scientific.
+
+"He is very kind and very generous--too generous.  He keeps sending
+for more money--hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him."
+
+"Were you EVER in love?"
+
+"Of course.  But it's all gone long ago.  It was like being hungry.
+Only very fine hungry.  Exquisite hungry. . . .  And then being
+disgusted. . . ."
+
+"He is in love with you."
+
+"What is love?" said Anna.  "He is grateful.  He is by nature
+grateful."  She smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who
+looks down on her bambino.
+
+"And you love nothing?"
+
+"I love Russia--and being alone, being completely alone.  When I am
+dead perhaps I shall be alone.  Not even my own body will touch me
+then."
+
+Then she added, "But I shall be sorry when he goes."
+
+Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone.  "Your Anna," he said,
+"is rather wonderful.  At first, I tell you now frankly I did not
+like her very much, I thought she looked 'used,' she drank vodka at
+lunch, she was gay, uneasily; she seemed a sham thing.  All that was
+prejudice.  She thinks; she's generous, she's fine."
+
+"She's tragic," said Prothero as though it was the same thing.
+
+He spoke as though he noted an objection.  His next remark confirmed
+this impression.  "That's why I can't take her back to Cambridge,"
+he said.
+
+"You see, Benham," he went on, "she's human.  She's not really
+feminine.  I mean, she's--unsexed.  She isn't fitted to be a wife or
+a mother any more.  We've talked about the possible life in England,
+very plainly.  I've explained what a household in Cambridge would
+mean. . . .  It doesn't attract her. . . .  In a way she's been let
+out from womanhood, forced out of womanhood, and I see now that when
+women are let out from womanhood there's no putting them back.  I
+could give a lecture on Anna.  I see now that if women are going to
+be wives and mothers and homekeepers and ladies, they must be got
+ready for it from the beginning, sheltered, never really let out
+into the wild chances of life.  She has been.  Bitterly.  She's
+REALLY emancipated.  And it's let her out into a sort of
+nothingness.  She's no longer a woman, and she isn't a man.  She
+ought to be able to go on her own--like a man.  But I can't take her
+back to Cambridge.  Even for her sake."
+
+His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.
+
+"You won't be happy in Cambridge--alone," said Benham.
+
+"Oh, damnably not!  But what can I do?  I had at first some idea of
+coming to Moscow for good--teaching."
+
+He paused.  "Impossible.  I'm worth nothing here.  I couldn't have
+kept her."
+
+"Then what are you going to do, Billy?"
+
+"I don't KNOW what I'm going to do, I tell you.  I live for the
+moment.  To-morrow we are going out into the country."
+
+"I don't understand," said Benham with a gesture of resignation.
+"It seems to me that if a man and woman love each other--well, they
+insist upon each other.  What is to happen to her if you leave her
+in Moscow?"
+
+"Damnation!  Is there any need to ask that?"
+
+"Take her to Cambridge, man.  And if Cambridge objects, teach
+Cambridge better manners."
+
+Prothero's face was suddenly transfigured with rage.
+
+"I tell you she won't come!" he said.
+
+"Billy!" said Benham, "you should make her!"
+
+"I can't."
+
+"If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything--"
+
+"But I don't love her like that," said Prothero, shrill with anger.
+"I tell you I don't love her like that."
+
+Then he lunged into further deeps.  "It's the other men," he said,
+"it's the things that have been.  Don't you understand?  Can't you
+understand?  The memories--she must have memories--they come between
+us.  It's something deeper than reason.  It's in one's spine and
+under one's nails.  One could do anything, I perceive, for one's
+very own woman. . . ."
+
+"MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.
+
+"I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts.  How could any man make
+her his very own woman now?  You--you don't seem to understand--
+ANYTHING.  She's nobody's woman--for ever.  That--that might-have-
+been has gone for ever. . . .  It's nerves--a passion of the nerves.
+There's a cruelty in life and--  She's KIND to me.  She's so kind to
+me. . . ."
+
+And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken
+fragments in letters.  When he looked for Anna Alexievna in
+December--he never learnt her surname--he found she had left the
+Cosmopolis Bazaar soon after Prothero's departure and he could not
+find whither she had gone.  He never found her again.  Moscow and
+Russia had swallowed her up.
+
+Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion.
+But Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a
+shock to Benham's ideas.  It was clear he went off almost callously;
+it would seem there was very little crying.  Towards the end it was
+evident that the two had quarrelled.  The tears only came at the
+very end of all.  It was almost as if he had got through the passion
+and was glad to go.  Then came regret, a regret that increased in
+geometrical proportion with every mile of distance.
+
+In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero.  He had some
+hours there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and
+women happy with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and
+full of delicious secrets, girls and women who ever and again
+flashed out some instant resemblance to Anna. . . .
+
+In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go
+back.  "But now I had the damned frontier," he wrote, "between us."
+
+It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let
+the "damned frontier" tip the balance against him.
+
+Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it
+seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured.  "I can't stand this
+business," he wrote.  "It has things in it, possibilities of
+emotional disturbance--you can have no idea!  In the train--luckily
+I was alone in the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I
+could not help it, I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar!  A
+beastly German came and stood in the corridor to stare.  I had to
+get out of the train.  It is disgraceful, it is monstrous we should
+be made like this. . . .
+
+"Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to
+you about my dismal feelings. . . ."
+
+After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero
+but to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of
+inappeasable regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the
+invincible earthliness of his friend.  Prothero stayed three nights
+in Paris.
+
+"There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris," he wrote.  "A
+levity.  I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet
+undescribed radiations.  Suddenly the world looks brightly
+cynical. . . .  None of those tear-compelling German emanations. . . .
+
+"And, Benham, I have found a friend.
+
+"A woman.  Of course you will laugh, you will sneer.  You do not
+understand these things. . . .  Yet they are so simple.  It was the
+strangest accident brought us together.  There was something that
+drew us together.  A sort of instinct.  Near the Boulevard
+Poissoniere. . . ."
+
+"Good heavens!" said Benham.  "A sort of instinct!"
+
+"I told her all about Anna!"
+
+"Good Lord!" cried Benham.
+
+"She understood.  Perfectly.  None of your so-called 'respectable'
+women could have understood. . . .  At first I intended merely to
+talk to her. . . ."
+
+Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.
+
+"Little Anna Alexievna!" he said, "you were too clean for him."
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign
+travel meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind
+of relief, to the grey mildness of Trinity.  He saw him, capped and
+gowned, and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings,
+resuming friendships.
+
+The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet
+Benedicts and restrained celibates at the high tables.  They ate on
+in their mature wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled.
+Presently they would withdraw processionally to the combination
+room. . . .
+
+There would be much to talk about over the wine.
+
+Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow. . . .
+
+He laughed abruptly.
+
+And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a
+space of years.  There may have been other letters, but if so they
+were lost in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-
+office.  Perhaps to this day they linger sere and yellow in some
+forgotten pigeon-hole in Kishinev or Ekaterinoslav. . . .
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+In November, after an adventure in the trader's quarter of Kieff
+which had brought him within an inch of death, and because an
+emotional wave had swept across him and across his correspondence
+with Amanda, Benham went back suddenly to England and her.  He
+wanted very greatly to see her and also he wanted to make certain
+arrangements about his property.  He returned by way of Hungary, and
+sent telegrams like shouts of excitement whenever the train stopped
+for a sufficient time.  "Old Leopard, I am coming, I am coming," he
+telegraphed, announcing his coming for the fourth time.  It was to
+be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the mutual refreshment
+of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to Russia again.
+
+Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the
+utmost dignity of expectant maternity.  Like many other people he
+had been a little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a
+common human experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a
+rare and sacramental function.  Amanda had become very beautiful in
+quiet, grey, dove-like tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had
+given way to a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, her brisk little
+neck that had always reminded him of the stalk of a flower was now
+softened and rounded; her eyes were tender, and she moved about the
+place in the manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice.  She
+dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment
+in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-
+sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's
+unparalleled immolation.  The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere,
+and at his bedside he found--it had been put there for him by
+Amanda--among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that most
+wonderful of all philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.
+
+Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the
+impending fact.  An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept
+Sir Godfrey in the depths of London society, but to make up for his
+absence Mrs. Morris had taken a little cottage down by the river and
+the Wilder girls were with her, both afire with fine and subtle
+feelings and both, it seemed, and more particularly Betty, prepared
+to be keenly critical of Benham's attitude.
+
+He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had
+returned in a rather different vein of exaltation.
+
+In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments
+an effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed.  It was
+as if she put aside for him something official, something sincerely
+maintained, necessary, but at times a little irksome.  It was as if
+she was glad to take him into her confidence and unbend.  Within the
+pre-natal Amanda an impish Amanda still lingered.
+
+There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must
+never know. . . .
+
+But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most
+unpontifical moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who
+had drawn him home across Europe.  At times she was extraordinarily
+jolly.  They had two or three happy walks about the Chexington
+woods; that year the golden weather of October had flowed over into
+November, and except for a carpet of green and gold under the horse-
+chestnuts most of the leaves were still on the trees.  Gleams of her
+old wanton humour shone on him.  And then would come something else,
+something like a shadow across the world, something he had quite
+forgotten since his idea of heroic love had flooded him, something
+that reminded him of those long explanations with Mr. Rathbone-
+Sanders that had never been explained, and of the curate in the
+doorway of the cottage and his unaccountable tears.
+
+On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little
+surprised to find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into
+the garden, with an accustomed familiarity.  Sir Philip perceived
+him with a start that was instantly controlled, and greeted him with
+unnatural ease.
+
+Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket
+in the neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending
+the summer, the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from
+scholars and literary men.  A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought
+to have been aviating or travelling.
+
+Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that
+there was a flavour of established association in their manner.  But
+then Sir Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne.  She
+called him "Pip," and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-
+court to him, "Pip!"  And then he called her "Amanda."  When the
+Wilder girls came up to join the tennis he was just as brotherly. . . .
+
+The next day he came to lunch.
+
+During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been
+before of the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes.
+They watched him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that
+seemed at once pained and tender.  And there was something about
+Amanda, a kind of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of
+something undefinably suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive
+certitude that that afternoon Sir Philip would be spoken to
+privately, and that then he would pack up and go away in a state of
+illumination from Chexington.  But before he could be spoken to he
+contrived to speak to Benham.
+
+They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took
+advantage of a pause to commit his little indiscretion.
+
+"Mrs. Benham," he said, "looks amazingly well--extraordinarily well,
+don't you think?"
+
+"Yes," said Benham, startled.  "Yes.  She certainly keeps very
+well."
+
+"She misses you terribly," said Sir Philip; "it is a time when a
+woman misses her husband.  But, of course, she does not want to
+hamper your work. . . ."
+
+Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest
+in these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no
+better expression for this than a grunt.
+
+"You don't mind," said the young man with a slight catch in the
+breath that might have been apprehensive, "that I sometimes bring
+her books and flowers and things?  Do what little I can to keep life
+interesting down here?  It's not very congenial. . . .  She's so
+wonderful--I think she is the most wonderful woman in the world."
+
+Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was
+really a primitive barbarian in these matters.
+
+"I've no doubt," he said, "that my wife has every reason to be
+grateful for your attentions."
+
+In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir
+Philip was engendering something still more personal.  If so, he
+might be constrained to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl
+of chrysanthemums over Sir Philip's head, or kick him in an
+improving manner.  He had a ridiculous belief that Sir Philip would
+probably take anything of the sort very touchingly.  He scrambled in
+his mind for some remark that would avert this possibility.
+
+"Have you ever been in Russia?" he asked hastily.  "It is the most
+wonderful country in Europe.  I had an odd adventure near Kiev.
+During a pogrom."
+
+And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description. . . .
+
+But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were
+presently thrown out by Lady Marayne.  They were so much more in the
+air. . . .
+
+
+
+18
+
+
+Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had
+foreseen.
+
+"Easton has gone away," he remarked three days later to Amanda.
+
+"I told him to go.  He is a bore with you about.  But otherwise he
+is rather a comfort, Cheetah." She meditated upon Sir Philip.  "And
+he's an HONOURABLE man," she said.  "He's safe. . . ."
+
+
+
+19
+
+
+After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in
+earnest.  The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic
+love for the modern aristocrat ended abruptly.  Instead there came
+the first draft for a study of jealousy.  The note was written in
+pencil on Chexington notepaper and manifestly that had been
+supported on the ribbed cover of a book.  There was a little
+computation in the corner, converting forty-five degrees Reaumur
+into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White guess it had been written
+in the Red Sea.  But, indeed, it had been written in a rather
+amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's journey to the
+gathering revolt in Moscow. . . .
+
+"I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual
+jealousy. . . .  I thought it was something essentially
+contemptible, something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in
+the mere effort to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it
+is not quite so easily settled with. . . .
+
+"One likes to know. . . .  Possibly one wants to know too
+much. . . .  In phases of fatigue, and particularly in phases of
+sleeplessness, when one is leaving all that one cares for behind, it
+becomes an irrational torment. . . .
+
+"And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of
+this base motive.  I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how
+strongly jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs
+with a man. . . .
+
+"There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human
+being being one's ownest own--utterly one's own. . . .
+
+"There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives. . . .
+
+"One does. . . .
+
+"There is something dishonouring in distrust--to both the distrusted
+and the one who distrusts. . . ."
+
+After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.
+
+
+
+20
+
+
+Benham did not see Amanda again until after the birth of their
+child.  He spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the
+fitful fighting and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and
+taking care of a lost and helpless English family whose father had
+gone astray temporarily on the way home from Baku.  Then he went
+southward to Rostov and thence to Astrakhan.  Here he really began
+his travels.  He determined to get to India by way of Herat and for
+the first time in his life rode out into an altogether lawless
+wilderness.  He went on obstinately because he found himself
+disposed to funk the journey, and because discouragements were put
+in his way.  He was soon quite cut off from all the ways of living
+he had known.  He learnt what it is to be flea-bitten, saddle-sore,
+hungry and, above all, thirsty.  He was haunted by a dread of fever,
+and so contrived strange torments for himself with overdoses of
+quinine.  He ceased to be traceable from Chexington in March, and he
+reappeared in the form of a telegram from Karachi demanding news in
+May.  He learnt he was the father of a man-child and that all was
+well with Amanda.
+
+He had not expected to be so long away from any communication with
+the outer world, and something in the nature of a stricken
+conscience took him back to England.  He found a second William
+Porphyry in the world, dominating Chexington, and Amanda tenderly
+triumphant and passionate, the Madonna enthroned.  For William
+Porphyry he could feel no emotion.  William Porphyry was very red
+and ugly and protesting, feeble and aggressive, a matter for a
+skilled nurse.  To see him was to ignore him and dispel a dream.  It
+was to Amanda Benham turned again.
+
+For some days he was content to adore his Madonna and listen to the
+familiar flatteries of her love.  He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda
+said, and wiser, so that she was afraid of him. . . .
+
+And then he became aware that she was requiring him to stay at her
+side.  "We have both had our adventures," she said, which struck him
+as an odd phrase.
+
+It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those
+conceptions of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so
+clearly understood between them had vanished from her mind.  She had
+absolutely forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had
+seemed to him the crowning instant, the real marriage of their
+lives.  It had gone, it had left no recoverable trace in her.  And
+upon his interpretations of that he had loved her passionately for a
+year.  She was back at exactly the ideas and intentions that ruled
+her during their first settlement in London.  She wanted a joint
+life in the social world of London, she demanded his presence, his
+attention, the daily practical evidences of love.  It was all very
+well for him to be away when the child was coming, but now
+everything was different.  Now he must stay by her.
+
+This time he argued no case.  These issues he had settled for ever.
+Even an indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation
+that began with appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him.
+Behind these things now was India.  The huge problems of India had
+laid an unshakeable hold upon his imagination.  He had seen Russia,
+and he wanted to balance that picture by a vision of the east. . . .
+
+He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington.  The young
+man displayed no further disposition to be confidentially
+sentimental.  But he seemed to have something on his mind.  And
+Amanda said not a word about him.  He was a young man above
+suspicion, Benham felt. . . .
+
+And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these
+two larger carnivores began to change.  Except for the repetition of
+accustomed endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense
+of the word.  They dealt chiefly with the "Cub," and even there
+Benham felt presently that the enthusiasm diminished.  A new amazing
+quality for Amanda appeared--triteness.  The very writing of her
+letters changed as though it had suddenly lost backbone.  Her
+habitual liveliness of phrasing lost its point.  Had she lost her
+animation?  Was she ill unknowingly?  Where had the light gone?  It
+was as if her attention was distracted. . . .  As if every day when
+she wrote her mind was busy about something else.
+
+Abruptly at last he understood.  A fact that had never been stated,
+never formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to
+convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question
+perceived to be THERE. . . .
+
+He left a record of that moment of realization.
+
+"Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had
+never seen Amanda before.  Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with
+that same dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a
+pitiless, a scientific distinctness that has neither light nor
+shadow. . . .
+
+"Of course," I said, and then presently I got up very softly. . . .
+
+"I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin.  I
+wanted to feel the largeness of the sky.  I went out upon the deck.
+We were off the coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment,
+there comes back to me also the faint flavour of spice in the air,
+the low line of the coast, the cool flooding abundance of the Indian
+moonlight, the swish of the black water against the side of the
+ship.  And a perception of infinite loss, as if the limitless
+heavens above this earth and below to the very uttermost star were
+just one boundless cavity from which delight had fled. . . .
+
+"Of course I had lost her.  I knew it with absolute certainty.  I
+knew it from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her
+needs.  I knew it from every line she had written me in the last
+three months.  I knew it intuitively.  She had been unfaithful.  She
+must have been unfaithful.
+
+"What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?"
+
+
+
+21
+
+
+"Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters.  Let
+me be at least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I
+may have been led into by force of my passions.  Always I have
+despised jealousy. . . .
+
+"Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the
+aristocratic life to be achieved.  They come in a certain order, and
+in that order the spirit of man is armed against them less and less
+efficiently.  Of fear and my struggle against fear I have told
+already.  I am fearful.  I am a physical coward until I can bring
+shame and anger to my assistance, but in overcoming fear I have been
+helped by the whole body of human tradition.  Every one, the basest
+creatures, every Hottentot, every stunted creature that ever
+breathed poison in a slum, knows that the instinctive constitution
+of man is at fault here and that fear is shameful and must be
+subdued.  The race is on one's side.  And so there is a vast
+traditional support for a man against the Second Limitation, the
+limitation of physical indulgence.  It is not so universal as the
+first, there is a grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness,
+but common pride is against it.  And in this matter my temperament
+has been my help: I am fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and
+feel a shivering recoil from excess.  It is no great virtue; it
+happens so; it is something in the nerves of my skin.  I cannot
+endure myself unshaven or in any way unclean; I am tormented by
+dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories, and after I had once
+loved Amanda I could not--unless some irrational impulse to get
+equal with her had caught me--have broken my faith to her, whatever
+breach there was in her faith to me. . . .
+
+"I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more
+easily clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that
+distinctive virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of
+resentment and anger.
+
+"I despised a jealous man.  There is a traditional discredit of
+jealousy, not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very
+strong.  But the general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped
+up with the supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, that it
+is unreasonable suspicion.  Given a cause then tradition speaks with
+an uncertain voice. . . .
+
+"I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was
+impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable to
+imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as
+fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my
+image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that
+she was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when
+silently, gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a
+pool, that knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated
+up into my consciousness.
+
+"And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me!  Outrageously.
+Abominably.
+
+"Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this
+question.  My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right
+whatever to her love or loyalty.  I must have that very clear. . . .
+
+"This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except
+accidentally here and there, incompatible with the domestic life.
+It means going hither and thither in the universe of thought as much
+as in the universe of matter, it means adventure, it means movement
+and adventure that must needs be hopelessly encumbered by an
+inseparable associate, it means self-imposed responsibilities that
+will not fit into the welfare of a family.  In all ages, directly
+society had risen above the level of a barbaric tribal village, this
+need of a release from the family for certain necessary types of
+people has been recognized.  It was met sometimes informally,
+sometimes formally, by the growth and establishment of special
+classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of pledged knights, of
+a great variety of non-family people, whose concern was the larger
+collective life that opens out beyond the simple necessities and
+duties and loyalties of the steading and of the craftsman's house.
+Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form of celibacy;
+but besides that there have been a hundred institutional variations
+of the common life to meet the need of the special man, the man who
+must go deep and the man who must go far.  A vowed celibacy ceased
+to be a tolerable rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic idea
+entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristocracy means the
+abandonment of the racial future to a proletariat of base unleaderly
+men.  That was plain to Plato.  It was plain to Campanelea.  It was
+plain to the Protestant reformers.  But the world has never yet gone
+on to the next step beyond that recognition, to the recognition of
+feminine aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as
+untrammelled by domestic servitudes and family relationships as the
+men of their kind.  That I see has always been my idea since in my
+undergraduate days I came under the spell of Plato.  It was a matter
+of course that my first gift to Amanda should be his REPUBLIC.  I
+loved Amanda transfigured in that dream. . . .
+
+"There are no such women. . . .
+
+"It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with
+myself.  I had no sound reason for supposing that.  I did suppose
+that.  I did not perceive that not only was she younger than myself,
+but that while I had been going through a mill of steely education,
+kept close, severely exercised, polished by discussion, she had but
+the weak training of a not very good school, some scrappy reading,
+the vague discussions of village artists, and the draped and
+decorated novelties of the 'advanced.'  It all went to nothing on
+the impact of the world. . . .  She showed herself the woman the
+world has always known, no miracle, and the alternative was for me
+to give myself to her in the ancient way, to serve her happiness, to
+control her and delight and companion her, or to let her go.
+
+"The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm
+and her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home.  She
+demands the concentration of a man.  Not to be able to command that
+is her failure.  Not to give her that is to shame her.  As I had
+shamed Amanda. . . ."
+
+
+
+22
+
+
+"There are no such women."  He had written this in and struck it
+out, and then at some later time written it in again.  There it
+stayed now as his last persuasion, but it set White thinking and
+doubting.  And, indeed, there was another sheet of pencilled broken
+stuff that seemed to glance at quite another type of womanhood.
+
+
+
+23
+
+
+"It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the
+remaking of the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as
+great as those from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes.
+These women must become aristocratic through their own innate
+impulse, they must be self-called to their lives, exactly as men
+must be; there is no making an aristocrat without a predisposition
+for rule and nobility.  And they have to discover and struggle
+against just exactly the limitations that we have to struggle
+against.  They have to conquer not only fear but indulgence,
+indulgence of a softer, more insidious quality, and jealousy--
+proprietorship. . . .
+
+"It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand
+times in my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and
+desired a mate.  A mate--not a possession.  It is a need almost
+naively simple.  If only one could have a woman who thought of one
+and with one!  Though she were on the other side of the world and
+busied about a thousand things. . . .
+
+"'WITH one,' I see it must be rather than 'OF one.'  That 'of one'
+is just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again. . . .
+
+"Man is a mating creature.  It is not good to be alone.  But mating
+means a mate. . . .
+
+"We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying. . . .
+
+"And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers.
+'Dancing attendance'--as they used to say.  We should meet upon our
+ways as the great carnivores do. . . .
+
+"That at any rate was a sound idea.  Though we only played with it.
+
+"But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible
+satisfaction now for me.  What is the good of dreaming?  Life and
+chance have played a trick upon my body and soul.  I am mated,
+though I am mated to a phantom.  I loved and I love Arnanda, not
+Easton's Amanda, but Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams.
+Sense, and particularly the sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason
+in us.  There can be no mate for me now unless she comes with
+Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and Amanda's quick movements and
+her clever hands. . . ."
+
+
+
+24
+
+
+"Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave
+me?
+
+"There were things between us two as lovers,--love, things more
+beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind
+hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible
+expression, images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals,
+images of moonlight in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the
+shade, of far-off wonderful music heard at dusk in a great
+stillness, of fairies dancing softly, of floating happiness and
+stirring delights, of joys as keen and sudden as the knife of an
+assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears, tears that are
+happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations, gratitudes,
+sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft eyelid closed
+in sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard unexpectedly;
+sweet, dear magical things that I can find no words for. . . .
+
+"If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that
+she was not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that
+has been between us more cheaply than I did?  It does not change one
+jot of it for me.  At the time she did not hold it cheaply.  She
+forgets where I do not forget. . . ."
+
+
+
+25
+
+
+Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.
+
+Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda
+and himself.
+
+He did not at once turn homeward.  It was in Ceylon that he dropped
+his work and came home.  At Colombo he found a heap of letters
+awaiting him, and there were two of these that had started at the
+same time.  They had been posted in London on one eventful
+afternoon.  Lady Marayne and Amanda had quarrelled violently.  Two
+earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women, full of neat but belated
+repartee, separated to write their simultaneous letters.  Each
+letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.  Lady
+Marayne told her story ruthlessly.  Amanda, on the other hand,
+generalized, and explained.  Sir Philip's adoration of her was a
+love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure.  Was there no trust
+nor courage in the world?  She would defy all jealous scandal.  She
+would not even banish him from her side.  Surely the Cheetah could
+trust her.  But the pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond
+Amanda's explaining.  The little lady's dignity had been stricken.
+"I have been used as a cloak," she wrote.
+
+Her phrases were vivid.  She quoted the very words of Amanda, words
+she had overheard at Chexington in the twilight.  They were no
+invention.  They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover.  It was
+as sure as if Benham had heard the sound of her voice, as if he had
+peeped and seen, as if she had crept by him, stooping and rustling
+softly.  It brought back the living sense of her, excited, flushed,
+reckless; his wild-haired Amanda of infinite delight. . . .  All day
+those words of hers pursued him.  All night they flared across the
+black universe.  He buried his face in the pillows and they
+whispered softly in his ear.
+
+He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.
+
+He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the
+stirring quiet of the stars.
+
+He sent no notice of his coming back.  Nor did he come back with a
+definite plan.  But he wanted to get at Amanda.
+
+
+
+26
+
+
+It was with Amanda he had to reckon.  Towards Easton he felt
+scarcely any anger at all.  Easton he felt only existed for him
+because Amanda willed to have it so.
+
+Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger.
+His devotion filled Benham with scorn.  His determination to serve
+Amanda at any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights
+for her, his humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her
+moods and happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility.
+That rage against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist
+against a blackleg.  Are all the women to fall to the men who will
+be their master-slaves and keepers?  But it was not simply that
+Benham felt men must be freed from this incessant attendance; women
+too must free themselves from their almost instinctive demand for an
+attendant. . . .
+
+His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings.
+Never in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be
+fooled and won and competed for and fought over.  So that it was
+Amanda he wanted to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated
+and ruled his senses only to fling him into this intolerable pit of
+shame and jealous fury.  But the forces that were driving him home
+now were the forces below the level of reason and ideas, organic
+forces compounded of hate and desire, profound aboriginal urgencies.
+He thought, indeed, very little as he lay in his berth or sulked on
+deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless invasion of exasperating
+images that ever and again would so wring him that his muscles would
+tighten and his hands clench or he would find himself restraining a
+snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.
+
+Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole
+world.  She filled the skies.  She bent over him and mocked him.
+She became a mystery of passion and dark beauty.  She was the sin of
+the world.  One breathed her in the winds of the sea.  She had taken
+to herself the greatness of elemental things. . . .
+
+So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see
+that she was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather
+tired and very frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an
+evening-dress of unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of
+gold and colour about her wrists and neck.
+
+In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him
+homeward.  He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has
+greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.
+
+For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to
+kill than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.
+
+
+
+27
+
+
+He took them by surprise.  It had been his intention to take them by
+surprise.  Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.
+
+He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near
+Charing Cross.  In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in
+Lancaster Gate.  The butler was deferentially amazed.  Mrs. Benham
+was, he said, at a theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought
+some other people also.  He did not know when she would be back.
+She might go on to supper.  It was not the custom for the servants
+to wait up for her.
+
+Benham went into the study that reduplicated his former rooms in
+Finacue Street and sat down before the fire the butler lit for him.
+He sent the man to bed, and fell into profound meditation.
+
+It was nearly two o'clock when he heard the sound of her latchkey
+and went out at once upon the landing.
+
+The half-door stood open and Easton's car was outside.  She stood in
+the middle of the hall and relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he
+was carrying.
+
+"Good-night," she said, "I am so tired."
+
+"My wonderful goddess," he said.
+
+She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, then started, stared,
+and wrenched herself out of his arms.
+
+Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon them, white-
+faced and inexpressive.  Easton dropped back a pace.  For a moment
+no one moved nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton shut the half-
+door and shut out the noises of the road.
+
+For some seconds Benham regarded them, and as he did so his spirit
+changed. . . .
+
+Everything he had thought of saying and doing vanished out of his
+mind.
+
+He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended the staircase.
+When he was five or six steps above them, he spoke.  "Just sit down
+here," he said, with a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself
+upon the stairs.  "DO sit down," he said with a sudden testiness as
+they continued standing.  "I know all about this affair.  Do please
+sit down and let us talk. . . .  Everybody's gone to bed long ago."
+
+"Cheetah!" she said.  "Why have you come back like this?"
+
+Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet.
+
+"I wish you would sit down, Easton," he said in a voice of subdued
+savagery.
+
+"Why have you come back?" Sir Philip Easton found his voice to ask.
+
+"SIT down," Benham spat, and Easton obeyed unwillingly.
+
+"I came back," Benham went on, "to see to all this.  Why else?  I
+don't--now I see you--feel very fierce about it.  But it has
+distressed me.  You look changed, Amanda, and fagged.  And your hair
+is untidy.  It's as if something had happened to you and made you a
+stranger. . . .  You two people are lovers.  Very natural and
+simple, but I want to get out of it.  Yes, I want to get out of it.
+That wasn't quite my idea, but now I see it is.  It's queer, but on
+the whole I feel sorry for you.  All of us, poor humans--.  There's
+reason to be sorry for all of us.  We're full of lusts and
+uneasiness and resentments that we haven't the will to control.
+What do you two people want me to do to you?  Would you like a
+divorce, Amanda?  It's the clean, straight thing, isn't it?  Or
+would the scandal hurt you?"
+
+Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on Benham.
+
+"Give us a divorce," said Easton, looking to her to confirm him.
+
+Amanda shook her head.
+
+"I don't want a divorce," she said.
+
+"Then what do you want?" asked Benham with sudden asperity.
+
+"I don't want a divorce," she repeated.  "Why do you, after a long
+silence, come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?"
+
+"It was the way it took me," said Benham, after a little interval.
+
+"You have left me for long months."
+
+"Yes.  I was angry.  And it was ridiculous to be angry.  I thought I
+wanted to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is
+to help you out of this miserable mess--and then get away from you.
+You two would like to marry.  You ought to be married."
+
+"I would die to make Amanda happy," said Easton.
+
+"Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make her happy.  That
+you may find more of a strain.  Less tragic and more tiresome.  I,
+on the other hand, want neither to die nor live for her."  Amanda
+moved sharply.  "It's extraordinary what amazing vapours a lonely
+man may get into his head.  If you don't want a divorce then I
+suppose things might go on as they are now."
+
+"I hate things as they are now," said Easton.  "I hate this
+falsehood and deception."
+
+"You would hate the scandal just as much," said Amanda.
+
+"I would not care what the scandal was unless it hurt you."
+
+"It would be only a temporary inconvenience," said Benham.  "Every
+one would sympathize with you. . . .  The whole thing is so
+natural. . . .  People would be glad to forget very soon.  They
+did with my mother."
+
+"No," said Amanda, "it isn't so easy as that."
+
+She seemed to come to a decision.
+
+"Pip," she said.  "I want to talk to--HIM--alone."
+
+Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity.  "But
+why?" he asked.
+
+"I do," she said.
+
+"But this is a thing for US."
+
+"Pip, I want to talk to him alone.  There is something--something I
+can't say before you. . . ."
+
+Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet.
+
+"Shall I wait outside?"
+
+"No, Pip.  Go home.  Yes,--there are some things you must leave to
+me."
+
+She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the
+younger man.  The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to
+be at any cost splendid.  He felt--and it was a most unexpected and
+disconcerting feeling--that he was no longer confederated with
+Amanda; that prior, more fundamental and greater associations
+prevailed over his little new grip upon her mind and senses.  He
+stared at husband and wife aghast in this realization.  Then his
+resolute romanticism came to his help.  "I would trust you--" he
+began.  "If you tell me to go--"
+
+Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.
+
+She laid her hand upon his arm.  "Go, my dear Pip," she said.  "Go."
+
+He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham
+as though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen,
+somewhere, he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in
+a gap that otherwise he could not have supplied.
+
+Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly
+dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.
+
+"WELL?" said Benham.
+
+She held out her arms to him.
+
+"Why did you leave me, Cheetah?  Why did you leave me?"
+
+
+
+28
+
+
+Benham affected to ignore those proffered arms.  But they recalled
+in a swift rush the animal anger that had brought him back to
+England.  To remind him of desire now was to revive an anger
+stronger than any desire.  He spoke seeking to hurt her.
+
+"I am wondering now," he said, "why the devil I came back."
+
+"You had to come back to me."
+
+"I could have written just as well about these things."
+
+"CHEETAH," she said softly, and came towards him slowly, stooping
+forward and looking into his eyes, "you had to come back to see your
+old Leopard.  Your wretched Leopard.  Who has rolled in the dirt.
+And is still yours."
+
+"Do you want a divorce?  How are we to fix things, Amanda?"
+
+"Cheetah, I will tell you how we will fix things."
+
+She dropped upon the step below him.  She laid her hands with a
+deliberate softness upon him, she gave a toss so that her disordered
+hair was a little more disordered, and brought her soft chin down to
+touch his knees.  Her eyes implored him.
+
+"Cheetah," she said.  "You are going to forgive."
+
+He sat rigid, meeting her eyes.
+
+"Amanda," he said at last, "you would be astonished if I kicked you
+away from me and trampled over you to the door.  That is what I want
+to do."
+
+"Do it," she said, and the grip of her hands tightened.  "Cheetah,
+dear!  I would love you to kill me."
+
+"I don't want to kill you."
+
+Her eyes dilated.  "Beat me."
+
+"And I haven't the remotest intention of making love to you," he
+said, and pushed her soft face and hands away from him as if he
+would stand up.
+
+She caught hold of him again.  "Stay with me," she said.
+
+He made no effort to shake off her grip.  He looked at the dark
+cloud of her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of
+old delights made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as
+he spoke.  "Dear Leopard," he said, "we humans are the most streaky
+of conceivable things.  I thought I hated you.  I do.  I hate you
+like poison.  And also I do not hate you at all."
+
+Then abruptly he was standing over her.
+
+She rose to her knees.
+
+"Stay here, old Cheetah!" she said.  "This is your house.  I am your
+wife."
+
+He went towards the unfastened front door.
+
+"Cheetah!" she cried with a note of despair.
+
+He halted at the door.
+
+"Amanda, I will come to-morrow.  I will come in the morning, in the
+sober London daylight, and then we will settle things."
+
+He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled.  He spoke as one
+who remarks upon a quite unexpected fact. . . .
+
+"Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human being that I wanted
+so little to kill."
+
+
+
+29
+
+
+White found a fragment that might have been written within a week of
+those last encounters of Benham and Amanda.
+
+"The thing that astonished me most in Amanda was the change in her
+mental quality.
+
+"With me in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she
+had deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about
+herself.  Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential
+strength.  And it was gone.  I came back to find Amanda an
+accomplished actress, a thing of poses and calculated effects.  She
+was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei.  Beneath that surface I could not
+discover anything individual at all.  Fear and a grasping quality,
+such as God gave us all when he gave us hands; but the individual I
+knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard was gone.  Whither, I
+cannot imagine.  An amazing disappearance.  Clean out of space and
+time like a soul lost for ever.
+
+"When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene,
+she acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in
+reality. . . .
+
+"I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this
+way, by cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she
+despised. . . .  There can be no inequality in love.  Give and take
+must balance.  One must be one's natural self or the whole business
+is an indecent trick, a vile use of life!  To use inferiors in love
+one must needs talk down to them, interpret oneself in their
+insufficient phrases, pretend, sentimentalize.  And it is clear that
+unless oneself is to be lost, one must be content to leave alone all
+those people that one can reach only by sentimentalizing.  But
+Amanda--and yet somehow I love her for it still--could not leave any
+one alone.  So she was always feverishly weaving nets of false
+relationship.  Until her very self was forgotten.  So she will go on
+until the end.  With Easton it had been necessary for her to key
+herself to a simple exalted romanticism that was entirely insincere.
+She had so accustomed herself to these poses that her innate
+gestures were forgotten.  She could not recover them; she could not
+even reinvent them.  Between us there were momentary gleams as
+though presently we should be our frank former selves again.  They
+were never more than momentary. . . ."
+
+And that was all that this astonishing man had seen fit to tell of
+his last parting from his wife.
+
+Perhaps he did Amanda injustice.  Perhaps there was a stronger
+thread of reality in her desire to recover him than he supposed.
+Clearly he believed that under the circumstances Amanda would have
+tried to recover anybody.
+
+She had dressed for that morning's encounter in a very becoming and
+intimate wrap of soft mauve and white silk, and she had washed and
+dried her dark hair so that it was a vapour about her face.  She set
+herself with a single mind to persuade herself and Benham that they
+were inseparable lovers, and she would not be deflected by his grim
+determination to discuss the conditions of their separation.  When
+he asked her whether she wanted a divorce, she offered to throw over
+Sir Philip and banish him for ever as lightly as a great lady might
+sacrifice an objectionable poodle to her connubial peace.
+
+Benham passed through perplexing phases, so that she herself began
+to feel that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands.  His
+initial grimness she could understand, and partially its breakdown
+into irritability.  But she was puzzled by his laughter.  For he
+laughed abruptly.
+
+"You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of tremendous tragedy.  And
+really,--you are a Lark."
+
+And then overriding her altogether, he told her what he meant to do
+about their future and the future of their little son.
+
+"You don't want a divorce and a fuss.  Then I'll leave things.  I
+perceive I've no intention of marrying any more.  But you'd better
+do the straight thing.  People forget and forgive.  Especially when
+there is no one about making a fuss against you.
+
+"Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for shirking it.
+We'll both be able to get at the boy then.  You'll not hurt him, and
+I shall want to see him.  It's better for the boy anyhow not to have
+a divorce.
+
+"I'll not stand in your way.  I'll get a little flat and I shan't
+come too much to London, and when I do, you can get out of town.
+You must be discreet about Easton, and if people say anything about
+him, send them to me.  After all, this is our private affair.
+
+"We'll go on about money matters as we have been going.  I trust to
+you not to run me into overwhelming debts.  And, of course, if at
+any time, you do want to marry--on account of children or anything--
+if nobody knows of this conversation we can be divorced then. . . ."
+
+Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while
+Amanda gathered her forces for her last appeal.
+
+It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down
+before him and clung to his knees.  He struggled ridiculously to get
+himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate
+on the floor with her dishevelled hair about her.
+
+She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark
+Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet
+without.  He had come back.  The door reopened.  There was a slight
+pause, and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the
+second housemaid.  There are moments, suspended fragments of time
+rather than links in its succession, when the human eye is more
+intelligible than any words.
+
+The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a
+click of the door.
+
+"DAMN!" said Amanda.
+
+Then slowly she rose to her knees.
+
+She meditated through vast moments.
+
+"It's a cursed thing to be a woman," said Amanda.  She stood up.
+She put her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot
+about it.  After another long interval of thought she spoke.
+
+"Cheetah!" she said, "Old Cheetah! . . .
+
+"I didn't THINK it of you. . . ."
+
+Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a
+reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who
+packs a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.
+
+
+
+30
+
+
+The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in
+Danebury Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham's
+private processes the morning after this affair.
+
+Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London.
+She had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a
+coldly decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last
+man to behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way.
+On the morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor
+waiter that the occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar in
+the night, and almost immediately she was summoned to see Benham.
+
+He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little
+obscure the condition of the room behind him.  He was carefully
+dressed, and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever.  But
+one of his hands was tied up in a white bandage.
+
+"I am going this morning," he said, "I am going down now to
+breakfast.  I have had a few little accidents with some of the
+things in the room and I have cut my hand.  I want you to tell the
+manager and see that they are properly charged for on the
+bill. . . .  Thank you."
+
+The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.
+
+Benham's things were all packed up and the room had an air of having
+been straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive
+cataclysm.  One or two items that the chambermaid might possibly
+have overlooked in the normal course of things were carefully
+exhibited.  For example, the sheet had been torn into half a dozen
+strips and they were lying side by side on the bed.  The clock on
+the mantelpiece had been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded
+to pieces.  All the looking-glasses in the room were smashed,
+apparently the electric lamp that stood on the night table by the
+bedside had been wrenched off and flung or hammered about amidst the
+other breakables.  And there was a considerable amount of blood
+splashed about the room.  The head chambermaid felt unequal to the
+perplexities of the spectacle and summoned her most convenient
+friend, the head chambermaid on the third floor, to her aid.  The
+first-floor waiter joined their deliberations and several housemaids
+displayed a respectful interest in the matter.  Finally they invoked
+the manager.  He was still contemplating the scene of the disorder
+when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates warned him of
+Benham's return.
+
+Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly
+tranquil.
+
+"I had a kind of nightmare," he said.  "I am fearfully sorry to have
+disarranged your room.  You must charge me for the inconvenience as
+well as for the damage."
+
+
+
+31
+
+
+"An aristocrat cannot be a lover."
+
+"One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of
+life and the intricacies of another human being.  I do not mean that
+one may not love.  One loves the more because one does not
+concentrate one's love.  One loves nations, the people passing in
+the street, beasts hurt by the wayside, troubled scoundrels and
+university dons in tears. . . .
+
+"But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's
+hands I do not think one can expect to be loved.
+
+"An aristocrat must do without close personal love. . . ."
+
+This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper.  The writing
+ended halfway down the page.  Manifestly it was an abandoned
+beginning.  And it was, it seemed to White, the last page of all
+this confusion of matter that dealt with the Second and Third
+Limitations.  Its incompleteness made its expression perfect. . . .
+
+There Benham's love experience ended.  He turned to the great
+business of the world.  Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life
+no more; like Fear they were to be dismissed as far as possible and
+subdued when they could not be altogether dismissed.  Whatever
+stirrings of blood or imagination there were in him after that
+parting, whatever failures from this resolution, they left no trace
+on the rest of his research, which was concerned with the hates of
+peoples and classes and war and peace and the possibilities science
+unveils and starry speculations of what mankind may do.
+
+
+
+32
+
+
+But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter
+with Lady Marayne.
+
+The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger
+and distress.  Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so
+hopelessly dispersed and mixed.  And when for a moment it seemed to
+him that she was not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all,
+then with an instant eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory
+gleam.  "What are you doing in England, Poff?" she demanded.  "And
+what are you going to do?
+
+"Nothing!  And you are going to leave her in your house, with your
+property and a lover.  If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come
+back?  And why did you ever marry her?  You might have known; her
+father was a swindler.  She's begotten of deceit.  She'll tell her
+own story while you are away, and a pretty story she'll make of it."
+
+"Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?"
+
+"I never wanted you to go away from her.  If you'd stayed and
+watched her as a man should, as I begged you and implored you to do.
+Didn't I tell you, Poff?  Didn't I warn you?"
+
+"But now what am I to do?"
+
+"There you are!  That's just a man's way.  You get yourself into
+this trouble, you follow your passions and your fancies and fads and
+then you turn to me!  How can I help you now, Poff?  If you'd
+listened to me before!"
+
+Her blue eyes were demonstratively round.
+
+"Yes, but--"
+
+"I warned you," she interrupted.  "I warned you.  I've done all I
+could for you.  It isn't that I haven't seen through her.  When she
+came to me at first with that made-up story of a baby!  And all
+about loving me like her own mother.  But I did what I could.  I
+thought we might still make the best of a bad job.  And then--.  I
+might have known she couldn't leave Pip alone. . . .  But for weeks
+I didn't dream.  I wouldn't dream.  Right under my nose.  The
+impudence of it!"
+
+Her voice broke.  "Such a horrid mess!  Such a hopeless, horrid
+mess!"
+
+She wiped away a bright little tear. . . .
+
+"It's all alike.  It's your way with us.  All of you.  There isn't a
+man in the world deserves to have a woman in the world.  We do all
+we can for you.  We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for you and
+we talk for you.  All the sweet, warm little women there are!  And
+then you go away from us!  There never was a woman yet who pleased
+and satisfied a man, who did not lose him.  Give you everything and
+off you must go!  Lovers, mothers. . . ."
+
+It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother's troubles did not deal
+exclusively with himself.
+
+"But Amanda," he began.
+
+"If you'd looked after her properly, it would have been right
+enough.  Pip was as good as gold until she undermined him. . . .  A
+woman can't wait about like an umbrella in a stand. . . .  He was
+just a boy. . . .  Only of course there she was--a novelty.  It is
+perfectly easy to understand.  She flattered him. . . .  Men are
+such fools."
+
+"Still--it's no good saying that now."
+
+"But she'll spend all your money, Poff!  She'll break your back with
+debts.  What's to prevent her?  With him living on her!  For that's
+what it comes to practically."
+
+"Well, what am I to do?"
+
+"You aren't going back without tying her up, Poff?  You ought to
+stop every farthing of her money--every farthing.  It's your duty."
+
+"I can't do things like that."
+
+"But have you no Shame?  To let that sort of thing go on!"
+
+"If I don't feel the Shame of it--  And I don't."
+
+"And that money--.  I got you that money, Poff!  It was my money."
+
+Benham stared at her perplexed.  "What am I to do?" he asked.
+
+"Cut her off, you silly boy!  Tie her up!  Pay her through a
+solicitor.  Say that if she sees him ONCE again--"
+
+He reflected.  "No," he said at last.
+
+"Poff!" she cried, "every time I see you, you are more and more like
+your father.  You're going off--just as he did.  That baffled,
+MULISH look--priggish--solemn!  Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor
+woman has to bring into the world.  But you'll do nothing.  I know
+you'll do nothing.  You'll stand everything.  You--you Cuckold!  And
+she'll drive by me, she'll pass me in theatres with the money that
+ought to have been mine!  Oh!  Oh!"
+
+She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other.  But
+she went on talking.  Faster and faster, less and less coherently;
+more and more wildly abusive.  Presently in a brief pause of the
+storm Benham sighed profoundly. . . .
+
+It brought the scene to a painful end. . . .
+
+For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.
+
+He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was
+in default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her--
+he could never define what he owed her.
+
+And yet, what on earth was one to do?
+
+And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had
+misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and
+kindred goodwill.  He went down to see him before he returned to
+India.  But if there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham
+senior, it had been very carefully boarded over.  The parental mind
+and attention were entirely engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD
+about the heuristic method.  Somebody had been disrespectful to
+Martindale House and the thing was rankling almost unendurably.  It
+seemed to be a relief to him to show his son very fully the
+essentially illogical position of his assailant.  He was entirely
+inattentive to Benham's carefully made conversational opportunities.
+He would be silent at times while Benham talked and then he would
+break out suddenly with: "What seems to me so unreasonable, so
+ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second argument--if one
+can call it an argument--. . . .  A man who reasons as he does is
+bound to get laughed at.  If people will only see it. . . ."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER THE SIXTH
+
+THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
+
+
+
+1
+
+
+Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913.  Sometimes
+the two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection,
+sometimes with great bitterness.  When he met White in Johannesburg
+during the strike period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in
+London and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite
+footing.  It was her suggestion that they should meet.
+
+About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction.  He
+could not persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his
+relations to her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility,
+and yet at no precise point could he detect where he had definitely
+taken an ignoble step.  Through Amanda he was coming to the full
+experience of life.  Like all of us he had been prepared, he had
+prepared himself, to take life in a certain way, and life had taken
+him, as it takes all of us, in an entirely different and unexpected
+way. . . .  He had been ready for noble deeds and villainies, for
+achievements and failures, and here as the dominant fact of his
+personal life was a perplexing riddle.  He could not hate and
+condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of exoneration;
+he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without immediate
+shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he could
+not banish her from his mind.
+
+During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his
+mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but
+often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing
+denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing
+accepted.  Meanwhile he worked.  His nervous irritability increased,
+but it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.
+
+Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea
+and method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems
+he put together under his headings of the first three "Limitations."
+He had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and
+that instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of
+self which he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous
+exception of Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded.  Amanda.
+Amanda.  Amanda.  He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown
+that beating in his brain.
+
+Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
+prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this
+dream of a larger human purpose.  The bulk of his work was to
+discover and define that purpose, that purpose which must be the
+directing and comprehending form of all the activities of the noble
+life.  One cannot be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one
+must be noble to an end.  To make human life, collectively and in
+detail, a thing more comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous
+and coherent than it is to-day seemed to him the fundamental
+intention of all nobility.  He believed more and more firmly that
+the impulses to make and help and subserve great purposes are
+abundantly present in the world, that they are inhibited by hasty
+thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and that the real
+ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a release.
+He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men
+dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and
+he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult
+limitation.  In one place he had written it, "Prejudice or
+Divisions."  That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in
+the measure of its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great
+age, the noble age, would begin.
+
+So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world
+about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised
+disloyalties and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the
+papers that White struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to
+various aspects of this search for "Prejudice."  It seemed to White
+to be at once the most magnificent and the most preposterous of
+enterprises.  It was indeed no less than an enquiry into all the
+preventable sources of human failure and disorder. . . .  And it was
+all too manifest to White also that the last place in which Benham
+was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the back of his own
+head.
+
+Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array of
+influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of
+patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social
+consequence of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except
+the purely personal dissensions between man and man.  And he
+developed a metaphysical interpretation of these troubles.  "No
+doubt," he wrote in one place, "much of the evil between different
+kinds of men is due to uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling,
+but far more is it due to bad thinking."  At times he seemed on the
+verge of the persuasion that most human trouble is really due to bad
+metaphysics.  It was, one must remark, an extraordinary journey he
+had made; he had started from chivalry and arrived at metaphysics;
+every knight he held must be a logician, and ultimate bravery is
+courage of the mind.  One thinks of his coming to this conclusion
+with knit brows and balancing intentness above whole gulfs of
+bathos--very much as he had once walked the Leysin Bisse. . . .
+
+"Men do not know how to think," he insisted--getting along the
+planks; "and they will not realize that they do not know how to
+think.  Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of
+misconceptions. . . .  Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the
+mind, and muddled thinking as ignoble as dirty conduct. . . .
+Infinitely more disastrous."
+
+And again he wrote: "Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too
+eager to get into action.  There is our deepest trouble.  He takes
+conclusions ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry.  Life is so
+short that he thinks it better to err than wait.  He has no
+patience, no faith in anything but himself.  He thinks he is a being
+when in reality he is only a link in a being, and so he is more
+anxious to be complete than right.  The last devotion of which he is
+capable is that devotion of the mind which suffers partial
+performance, but insists upon exhaustive thought.  He scamps his
+thought and finishes his performance, and before he is dead it is
+already being abandoned and begun all over again by some one else in
+the same egotistical haste. . . ."
+
+It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these
+words should have been written by a man who walked the plank to
+fresh ideas with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to
+drag him forward, and who acted time after time with an altogether
+disastrous hastiness.
+
+
+
+2
+
+
+Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from
+the cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at
+cowardice and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete
+Research Magnificent.  You can no more resolve to live a life of
+honour nowadays and abstain from social and political scheming on a
+world-wide scale, than you can profess religion and refuse to think
+about God.  In the past it was possible to take all sorts of things
+for granted and be loyal to unexamined things.  One could be loyal
+to unexamined things because they were unchallenged things.  But now
+everything is challenged.  By the time of his second visit to
+Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious and deliberate aristocracy
+reaching out to an idea of universal responsibility had already
+grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he was, as it were, an
+uncrowned king in the world.  To be noble is to be aristocratic,
+that is to say, a ruler.  Thence it follows that aristocracy is
+multiple kingship, and to be an aristocrat is to partake both of the
+nature of philosopher and king. . . .
+
+Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no
+means necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in
+quality, petty in spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and
+limited, fall far short of kingship.  Nevertheless, there IS
+nobility, there IS kingship, or this earth is a dustbin and mankind
+but a kind of skin-disease upon a planet.  From that it is an easy
+step to this idea, the idea whose first expression had already so
+touched the imagination of Amanda, of a sort of diffused and
+voluntary kingship scattered throughout mankind.  The aristocrats
+are not at the high table, the kings are not enthroned, those who
+are enthroned are but pretenders and SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar;
+the real king and ruler is every man who sets aside the naive
+passions and self-interest of the common life for the rule and
+service of the world.
+
+This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary
+writing.  It is one of those ideas that seem to appear
+simultaneously at many points in the world, and it is impossible to
+say now how far Benham was an originator of this idea, and how far
+he simply resonated to its expression by others.  It was far more
+likely that Prothero, getting it heaven knows where, had spluttered
+it out and forgotten it, leaving it to germinate in the mind of his
+friend. . . .
+
+This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to
+Benham as his life went on.  When Benham walked the Bisse he was
+just a youngster resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled
+in the jungle by night he was there for all mankind.  With every
+year he became more and more definitely to himself a consecrated man
+as kings are consecrated.  Only that he was self-consecrated, and
+anointed only in his heart.  At last he was, so to speak, Haroun al
+Raschid again, going unsuspected about the world, because the palace
+of his security would not tell him the secrets of men's disorders.
+He was no longer a creature of circumstances, he was kingly,
+unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the Danes.  In the great later
+accumulations of his Research the personal matter, the
+introspection, the intimate discussion of motive, becomes less and
+less.  He forgets himself in the exaltation of kingliness.  He
+worries less and less over the particular rightness of his definite
+acts.  In these later papers White found Benham abstracted, self-
+forgetful, trying to find out with an ever increased self-
+detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why there are
+massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why we let famine,
+disease and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast
+multitudes in the midst of possible plenty.  And when he found out
+and as far as he found out, he meant quite simply and earnestly to
+apply his knowledge. . . .
+
+
+
+3
+
+
+The intellectualism of Benham intensified to the end.  His
+definition of Prejudice impressed White as being the most bloodless
+and philosophical formula that ever dominated the mind of a man.
+
+"Prejudice," Benham had written, "is that common incapacity of the
+human mind to understand that a difference in any respect is not a
+difference in all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by an
+instinctive hostility to what is unlike ourselves.  We exaggerate
+classification and then charge it with mischievous emotion by
+referring it to ourselves."  And under this comprehensive formula he
+proceeded to study and attack Family Prejudice, National Prejudice,
+Race Prejudice, War, Class Prejudice, Professional Prejudice, Sex
+Prejudice, in the most industrious and elaborate manner.  Whether
+one regards one's self or others he held that these prejudices are
+evil things.  "From the point of view of human welfare they break
+men up into wars and conflicts, make them an easy prey to those who
+trade upon suspicion and hostility, prevent sane collective co-
+operations, cripple and embitter life.  From the point of view of
+personal aristocracy they make men vulgar, violent, unjust and
+futile.  All the conscious life of the aristocrat must be a constant
+struggle against false generalizations; it is as much his duty to
+free himself from that as from fear, indulgence, and jealousy; it is
+a larger and more elaborate task, but it is none the less cardinal
+and essential.  Indeed it is more cardinal and essential.  The true
+knight has to be not only no coward, no self-pamperer, no egotist.
+He has to be a philosopher.  He has to be no hasty or foolish
+thinker.  His judgment no more than his courage is to be taken by
+surprise.
+
+"To subdue fear, desire and jealousy, is the aristocrat's personal
+affair, it is his ritual and discipline, like a knight watching his
+arms; but the destruction of division and prejudice and all their
+forms and establishments, is his real task, that is the common work
+of knighthood.  It is a task to be done in a thousand ways; one man
+working by persuasion, another by example, this one overthrowing
+some crippling restraint upon the freedom of speech and the spread
+of knowledge, and that preparing himself for a war that will shatter
+a tyrannous presumption.  Most imaginative literature, all
+scientific investigation, all sound criticism, all good building,
+all good manufacture, all sound politics, every honesty and every
+reasoned kindliness contribute to this release of men from the heat
+and confusions of our present world."
+
+It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part
+of his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he
+was not making his own personal research alone, but, side by side
+with a vast, masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of
+others; that this great idea of his was under kindred forms the
+great idea of thousands, that it was breaking as the dawn breaks,
+simultaneously to great numbers of people, and that the time was not
+far off when the new aristocracy, the disguised rulers of the world,
+would begin to realize their common bent and effort.  Into these
+latter papers there creeps more and more frequently a new
+phraseology, such expressions as the "Invisible King" and the
+"Spirit of Kingship," so that as Benham became personally more and
+more solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.
+
+Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of
+mankind.  He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices
+worked, to get at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind
+of prejudice, and to devise means for its treatment, destruction or
+neutralization.  He had no great faith in the power of pure
+reasonableness; his psychological ideas were modern, and he had
+grasped the fact that the power of most of the great prejudices that
+strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual level.
+Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
+with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to
+discover their sub-rational springs.
+
+A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at
+Westhaven Street which White from his extensive experience of the
+public patience decided could not possibly "make a book," consisted
+of notes and discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had
+made in this or that part of the world.  He began in Russia during
+the revolutionary trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and
+from place to place in Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom
+he had his first really illuminating encounter with race and culture
+prejudice.  His examination of the social and political condition of
+Russia seems to have left him much more hopeful than was the common
+feeling of liberal-minded people during the years of depression that
+followed the revolution of 1906, and it was upon the race question
+that his attention concentrated.
+
+The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India.  Here in an
+entirely different environment was another discord of race and
+culture, and he found in his study of it much that illuminated and
+corrected his impressions of the Russian issue.  A whole drawer was
+devoted to a comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into
+human dissensions in lower Bengal.  Here there were not only race
+but culture conflicts, and he could work particularly upon the
+differences between men of the same race who were Hindus, Christians
+and Mahometans respectively.  He could compare the Bengali Mahometan
+not only with the Bengali Brahminist, but also with the Mahometan
+from the north-west.  "If one could scrape off all the creed and
+training, would one find much the same thing at the bottom, or
+something fundamentally so different that no close homogeneous
+social life and not even perhaps a life of just compromise is
+possible between the different races of mankind?"
+
+His answer to that was a confident one.  "There are no such natural
+and unalterable differences in character and quality between any two
+sorts of men whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly co-
+operation in the world impossible," he wrote.
+
+But he was not satisfied with his observations in India.  He found
+the prevalence of caste ideas antipathetic and complicating.  He
+went on after his last parting from Amanda into China, it was the
+first of several visits to China, and thence he crossed to America.
+White found a number of American press-cuttings of a vehemently
+anti-Japanese quality still awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it
+was clear to him that Benham had given a considerable amount of
+attention to the development of the "white" and "yellow" race
+hostility on the Pacific slope; but his chief interest at that time
+had been the negro.  He went to Washington and thence south; he
+visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at a tangent to
+Hayti.  He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid book,
+WHERE BLACK RULES WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able to
+visit that wonderful monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La
+Ferriere, the citadel built a century ago by the "Black Napoleon,"
+the Emperor Christophe.  He went with a young American demonstrator
+from Harvard.
+
+
+
+4
+
+
+It was a memorable excursion.  They rode from Cap Haytien for a
+day's journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of
+luxurious vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of
+unbridled jungle with populous country.  They passed countless
+villages of thatched huts alive with curiosity and swarming with
+naked black children, and yet all the time they seemed to be in a
+wilderness.  They forded rivers, they had at times to force
+themselves through thickets, once or twice they lost their way, and
+always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great mountain peak
+with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the background
+until it dominated the landscape.  Long after dark they blundered
+upon rather than came to the village at its foot where they were to
+pass the night.  They were interrogated under a flaring torch by
+peering ragged black soldiers, and passed through a firelit crowd
+into the presence of the local commandant to dispute volubly about
+their right to go further.  They might have been in some remote
+corner of Nigeria.  Their papers, laboriously got in order, were
+vitiated by the fact, which only became apparent by degrees, that
+the commandant could not read.  They carried their point with
+difficulty.
+
+But they carried their point, and, watched and guarded by a hungry
+half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of
+trousers, they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of
+imperialism that humanity has ever made.  The roads and parks and
+prospects constructed by this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long
+since disappeared, and the three men clambered for hours up ravines
+and precipitous jungle tracks, occasionally crossing the winding
+traces of a choked and ruined road that had once been the lordly
+approach to his fastness.  Below they passed an abandoned palace of
+vast extent, a palace with great terraces and the still traceable
+outline of gardens, though there were green things pushing between
+the terrace steps, and trees thrust out of the empty windows.  Here
+from a belvedere of which the skull-like vestige still remained, the
+negro Emperor Christophe, after fourteen years of absolute rule, had
+watched for a time the smoke of the burning of his cane-fields in
+the plain below, and then, learning that his bodyguard had deserted
+him, had gone in and blown out his brains.
+
+He had christened the place after the best of examples, "Sans
+Souci."
+
+But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he
+never used.  The defection of his guards made him abandon that.  To
+build it, they say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives.  He had the
+true Imperial lavishness.  So high it was, so lost in a wilderness
+of trees and bush, looking out over a land relapsed now altogether
+to a barbarism of patch and hovel, so solitary and chill under the
+tropical sky--for even the guards who still watched over its
+suspected treasures feared to live in its ghostly galleries and had
+made hovels outside its walls--and at the same time so huge and
+grandiose--there were walls thirty feet thick, galleries with scores
+of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls, king's apartments and
+queen's apartments, towering battlements and great arched doorways--
+that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and passing of that
+miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing of multitudes
+before one man and the transitoriness of such glories, more
+completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world
+before.  Beneath the battlements--they are choked above with jungle
+grass and tamarinds and many flowery weeds--the precipice fell away
+a sheer two thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain
+populous and diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an
+amethystine wall.  Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling
+his victims, and below this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons
+where men, broken and torn, thrust in at the neck-like hole above,
+starved and died: it was his headquarters here, here he had his
+torture chambers and the means for nameless cruelties. . . .
+
+"Not a hundred years ago," said Benham's companion, and told the
+story of the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.
+
+"Leap," said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one
+questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last
+gesture of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed,
+and with a convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down
+through the shimmering air.
+
+Came presently the little faint sound of his fall.
+
+The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this
+projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and
+presently struggled and found itself still a living man.  It could
+scramble down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for
+mercy.  An hour and it stood before Christophe again, with an arm
+broken and bloody and a face torn, a battered thing now but with a
+faint flavour of pride in its bearing.  "Your bidding has been done,
+Sire," it said.
+
+"So," said the Emperor, unappeased.  "And you live?  Well--  Leap
+again. . . ."
+
+And then came other stories.  The young man told them as he had
+heard them, stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men
+standing along the walls of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by
+one as the feast went on, of exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and
+his one note of wonder, his refrain was, "HERE!  Not a hundred years
+ago. . . .  It makes one almost believe that somewhere things of
+this sort are being done now."
+
+They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins.  The
+lizards which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the
+sunshine.  The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his
+black fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a
+search for some saleable memento. . . .
+
+Benham sat musing in silence.  The thought of deliberate cruelty was
+always an actual physical distress to him.  He sat bathed in the
+dreamy afternoon sunlight and struggled against the pictures that
+crowded into his mind, pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-
+driven men toiling in agony, and of the shame of extorted obedience
+and of cringing and crawling black figures, and the defiance of
+righteous hate beaten down under blow and anguish.  He saw eyes
+alight with terror and lips rolled back in agony, he saw weary
+hopeless flight before striding proud destruction, he saw the poor
+trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in his soul. . . .
+
+He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride,
+and then the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes
+Christophes but humility.
+
+There is in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his
+superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking
+individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience.  Every
+natural sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly
+guidance, a definite direction for his own partial life.  At the
+bottom of his heart he feels, even if he does not know it
+definitely, that his life is partial.  He is driven to join himself
+on.  He obeys decision and the appearance of strength as a horse
+obeys its rider's voice.  One thinks of the pride, the uncontrolled
+frantic will of this black ape of all Emperors, and one forgets the
+universal docility that made him possible.  Usurpation is a crime to
+which men are tempted by human dirigibility.  It is the orderly
+peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much restraint above as
+stiff insubordination below that has to be taught to men.  There are
+kings and tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of the
+unkingliness of men.
+
+And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, Benham cast off
+from his mind his last tolerance for earthly kings and existing
+States, and expounded to another human being for the first time this
+long-cherished doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is the lord
+of human destiny, the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the
+sceptre and rule the earth. . . .  To the young American's naive
+American response to any simply felt emotion, he seemed with his
+white earnestness and his glowing eyes a veritable prophet. . . .
+
+"This is the root idea of aristocracy," said Benham.
+
+"I have never heard the underlying spirit of democracy, the real
+true Thing in democracy, so thoroughly expressed," said the young
+American.
+
+
+
+5
+
+
+Benham's notes on race and racial cultures gave White tantalizing
+glimpses of a number of picturesque experiences.  The adventure in
+Kieff had first roused Benham to the reality of racial quality.  He
+was caught in the wheels of a pogrom.
+
+"Before that time I had been disposed to minimize and deny race.  I
+still think it need not prevent men from the completest social co-
+operation, but I see now better than I did how difficult it is for
+any man to purge from his mind the idea that he is not primarily a
+Jew, a Teuton, or a Kelt, but a man.  You can persuade any one in
+five minutes that he or she belongs to some special and blessed and
+privileged sort of human being; it takes a lifetime to destroy that
+persuasion.  There are these confounded differences of colour, of
+eye and brow, of nose or hair, small differences in themselves
+except that they give a foothold and foundation for tremendous
+fortifications of prejudice and tradition, in which hostilities and
+hatreds may gather.  When I think of a Jew's nose, a Chinaman's eyes
+or a negro's colour I am reminded of that fatal little pit which
+nature has left in the vermiform appendix, a thing no use in itself
+and of no significance, but a gathering-place for mischief.  The
+extremest case of race-feeling is the Jewish case, and even here, I
+am convinced, it is the Bible and the Talmud and the exertions of
+those inevitable professional champions who live upon racial
+feeling, far more than their common distinction of blood, which
+holds this people together banded against mankind."
+
+Between the lines of such general propositions as this White read
+little scraps of intimation that linked with the things Benham let
+fall in Johannesburg to reconstruct the Kieff adventure.
+
+Benham had been visiting a friend in the country on the further side
+of the Dnieper.  As they drove back along dusty stretches of road
+amidst fields of corn and sunflower and through bright little
+villages, they saw against the evening blue under the full moon a
+smoky red glare rising from amidst the white houses and dark trees
+of the town.  "The pogrom's begun," said Benham's friend, and was
+surprised when Benham wanted to end a pleasant day by going to see
+what happens after the beginning of a pogrom.
+
+He was to have several surprises before at last he left Benham in
+disgust and went home by himself.
+
+For Benham, with that hastiness that so flouted his exalted
+theories, passed rapidly from an attitude of impartial enquiry to
+active intervention.  The two men left their carriage and plunged
+into the network of unlovely dark streets in which the Jews and
+traders harboured. . . .  Benham's first intervention was on behalf
+of a crouching and yelping bundle of humanity that was being dragged
+about and kicked at a street corner.  The bundle resolved itself
+into a filthy little old man, and made off with extraordinary
+rapidity, while Benham remonstrated with the kickers.  Benham's
+tallness, his very Gentile face, his good clothes, and an air of
+tense authority about him had its effect, and the kickers shuffled
+off with remarks that were partly apologies.  But Benham's friend
+revolted.  This was no business of theirs.
+
+Benham went on unaccompanied towards the glare of the burning
+houses.
+
+For a time he watched.  Black figures moved between him and the
+glare, and he tried to find out the exact nature of the conflict by
+enquiries in clumsy Russian.  He was told that the Jews had insulted
+a religious procession, that a Jew had spat at an ikon, that the
+shop of a cheating Jew trader had been set on fire, and that the
+blaze had spread to the adjacent group of houses.  He gathered that
+the Jews were running out of the burning block on the other side
+"like rats."  The crowd was mostly composed of town roughs with a
+sprinkling of peasants.  They were mischievous but undecided.  Among
+them were a number of soldiers, and he was surprised to see a
+policemen, brightly lit from head to foot, watching the looting of a
+shop that was still untouched by the flames.
+
+He held back some men who had discovered a couple of women's figures
+slinking along in the shadow beneath a wall.  Behind his
+remonstrances the Jewesses escaped.  His anger against disorder was
+growing upon him. . . .
+
+Late that night Benham found himself the leading figure amidst a
+party of Jews who had made a counter attack upon a gang of roughs in
+a court that had become the refuge of a crowd of fugitives.  Some of
+the young Jewish men had already been making a fight, rather a poor
+and hopeless fight, from the windows of the house near the entrance
+of the court, but it is doubtful if they would have made an
+effective resistance if it had not been for this tall excited
+stranger who was suddenly shouting directions to them in
+sympathetically murdered Russian.  It was not that he brought
+powerful blows or subtle strategy to their assistance, but that he
+put heart into them and perplexity into his adversaries because he
+was so manifestly non-partizan.  Nobody could ever have mistaken
+Benham for a Jew.  When at last towards dawn a not too zealous
+governor called out the troops and began to clear the streets of
+rioters, Benham and a band of Jews were still keeping the gateway of
+that court behind a hasty but adequate barricade of furniture and
+handbarrows.
+
+The ghetto could not understand him, nobody could understand him,
+but it was clear a rare and precious visitor had come to their
+rescue, and he was implored by a number of elderly, dirty, but very
+intelligent-looking old men to stay with them and preserve them
+until their safety was assured.
+
+They could not understand him, but they did their utmost to
+entertain him and assure him of their gratitude.  They seemed to
+consider him as a representative of the British Government, and
+foreign intervention on their behalf is one of those unfortunate
+fixed ideas that no persecuted Jews seem able to abandon.
+
+Benham found himself, refreshed and tended, sitting beside a wood
+fire in an inner chamber richly flavoured by humanity and listening
+to a discourse in evil but understandable German.  It was a
+discourse upon the wrongs and the greatness of the Jewish people--
+and it was delivered by a compact middle-aged man with a big black
+beard and long-lashed but animated eyes.  Beside him a very old man
+dozed and nodded approval.  A number of other men crowded the
+apartment, including several who had helped to hold off the rioters
+from the court.  Some could follow the talk and ever again endorsed
+the speaker in Yiddish or Russian; others listened with tantalized
+expressions, their brows knit, their lips moving.
+
+It was a discourse Benham had provoked.  For now he was at the very
+heart of the Jewish question, and he could get some light upon the
+mystery of this great hatred at first hand.  He did not want to hear
+tales of outrages, of such things he knew, but he wanted to
+understand what was the irritation that caused these things.
+
+So he listened.  The Jew dilated at first on the harmlessness and
+usefulness of the Jews.
+
+"But do you never take a certain advantage?" Benham threw out.
+
+"The Jews are cleverer than the Russians.  Must we suffer for that?"
+
+The spokesman went on to the more positive virtues of his race.
+Benham suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling of the Gentile who
+finds a bill being made against him.  Did the world owe Israel
+nothing for Philo, Aron ben Asher, Solomon Gabriol, Halevy,
+Mendelssohn, Heine, Meyerbeer, Rubinstein, Joachim, Zangwill?  Does
+Britain owe nothing to Lord Beaconsfield, Montefiore or the
+Rothschilds?  Can France repudiate her debt to Fould, Gaudahaux,
+Oppert, or Germany to Furst, Steinschneider, Herxheimer, Lasker,
+Auerbach, Traube and Lazarus and Benfey? . . .
+
+Benham admitted under the pressure of urgent tones and gestures that
+these names did undoubtedly include the cream of humanity, but was
+it not true that the Jews did press a little financially upon the
+inferior peoples whose lands they honoured in their exile?
+
+The man with the black beard took up the challenge bravely.
+
+"They are merciful creditors," he said.  "And it is their genius to
+possess and control.  What better stewards could you find for the
+wealth of nations than the Jews?  And for the honours?  That always
+had been the role of the Jews--stewardship.  Since the days of
+Joseph in Egypt. . . ."
+
+Then in a lower voice he went on to speak of the deficiencies of the
+Gentile population.  He wished to be just and generous but the truth
+was the truth.  The Christian Russians loved drink and laziness;
+they had no sense of property; were it not for unjust laws even now
+the Jews would possess all the land of South Russia. . . .
+
+Benham listened with a kind of fascination.  "But," he said.
+
+It was so.  And with a confidence that aroused a protest or so from
+the onlookers, the Jewish apologist suddenly rose up, opened a safe
+close beside the fire and produced an armful of documents.
+
+"Look!" he said, "all over South Russia there are these!"
+
+Benham was a little slow to understand, until half a dozen of these
+papers had been thrust into his hand.  Eager fingers pointed, and
+several voices spoke.  These things were illegalities that might
+some day be legal; there were the records of loans and hidden
+transactions that might at any time put all the surrounding soil
+into the hands of the Jew.  All South Russia was mortgaged. . . .
+
+"But is it so?" asked Benham, and for a time ceased to listen and
+stared into the fire.
+
+Then he held up the papers in his hand to secure silence and,
+feeling his way in unaccustomed German, began to speak and continued
+to speak in spite of a constant insurgent undertone of interruption
+from the Jewish spokesman.
+
+All men, Benham said, were brothers.  Did they not remember Nathan
+the Wise?
+
+"I did not claim him," said the spokesman, misunderstanding.  "He is
+a character in fiction."
+
+But all men are brothers, Benham maintained.  They had to be
+merciful to one another and give their gifts freely to one another.
+Also they had to consider each other's weaknesses.  The Jews were
+probably justified in securing and administering the property of
+every community into which they came, they were no doubt right in
+claiming to be best fitted for that task, but also they had to
+consider, perhaps more than they did, the feelings and vanities of
+the host population into which they brought these beneficent
+activities.  What was said of the ignorance, incapacity and vice of
+the Roumanians and Russians was very generally believed and
+accepted, but it did not alter the fact that the peasant, for all
+his incapacity, did like to imagine he owned his own patch and hovel
+and did have a curious irrational hatred of debt. . . .
+
+The faces about Benham looked perplexed.
+
+"THIS," said Benham, tapping the papers in his hand.  "They will not
+understand the ultimate benefit of it.  It will be a source of anger
+and fresh hostility.  It does not follow because your race has
+supreme financial genius that you must always follow its dictates to
+the exclusion of other considerations. . . ."
+
+The perplexity increased.
+
+Benham felt he must be more general.  He went on to emphasize the
+brotherhood of man, the right to equal opportunity, equal privilege,
+freedom to develop their idiosyncrasies as far as possible,
+unhindered by the idiosyncrasies of others.  He could feel the
+sympathy and understanding of his hearers returning.  "You see,"
+said Benham, "you must have generosity.  You must forget ancient
+scores.  Do you not see the world must make a fresh beginning?"
+
+He was entirely convinced he had them with him.  The heads nodded
+assent, the bright eyes and lips followed the slow disentanglement
+of his bad German.
+
+"Free yourselves and the world," he said.
+
+Applause.
+
+"And so," he said breaking unconsciously into English, "let us begin
+by burning these BEASTLY mortgages!"
+
+And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the
+fire.  The assenting faces became masks of horror.  A score of hands
+clutched at those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger
+filled the room.  Some one caught at his throat from behind.  "Don't
+kill him!" cried some one.  "He fought for us!"
+
+
+
+6
+
+
+An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled and
+battered condition to his hotel.  He found his friend in anxious
+consultation with the hotel proprietor.
+
+"We were afraid that something had happened to you," said his
+friend.
+
+"I got a little involved," said Benham.
+
+"Hasn't some one clawed your cheek?"
+
+"Very probably," said Benham.
+
+"And torn your coat?  And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?"
+
+"It was a complicated misunderstanding," said Benham.  "Oh! pardon!
+I'm rather badly bruised upon that arm you're holding."
+
+
+
+7
+
+
+Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.
+
+"I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my
+point of view," he said. . . .
+
+"I'm not sure if they quite followed my German. . . .
+
+"It's odd, too, that I remember saying, 'Let's burn these
+mortgages,' and at the time I'm almost sure I didn't know the German
+for mortgage. . . ."
+
+It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to
+grasp the full intention behind Benham's proceedings.  His
+aristocratic impulses were apt to run away with his conceptions of
+brotherhood, and time after time it was only too manifest to White
+that Benham's pallid flash of anger had astonished the subjects of
+his disinterested observations extremely.  His explorations in Hayti
+had been terminated abruptly by an affair with a native policeman
+that had necessitated the intervention of the British Consul.  It
+was begun with that suddenness that was too often characteristic of
+Benham, by his hitting the policeman.  It was in the main street of
+Cap Haytien, and the policeman had just clubbed an unfortunate youth
+over the head with the heavily loaded wooden club which is the
+normal instrument of Haytien discipline.  His blow was a repartee,
+part of a triangular altercation in which a large, voluble,
+mahogany-coloured lady whose head was tied up in a blue handkerchief
+played a conspicuous part, but it seemed to Benham an entirely
+unjustifiable blow.
+
+He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had
+been gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince
+to carry him away.  He advanced with the kind of shout one would
+hurl at a dog, and smote the policeman to the earth with the stout
+stick that the peculiar social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him
+to carry.  By the local standard his blow was probably a trivial
+one, but the moral effect of his indignant pallor and a sort of
+rearing tallness about him on these occasions was always very
+considerable.  Unhappily these characteristics could have no effect
+on a second negro policeman who was approaching the affray from
+behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on the shoulder that was
+meant for the head, and with the assistance of his colleague
+overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.
+
+The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to
+the lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer's
+superior knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his
+British citizenship.
+
+The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German
+gunboat was still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed
+it that in spite of his blank refusal to compensate the man he had
+knocked over, he was after two days of anger, two days of extreme
+insanitary experience, and much meditation upon his unphilosophical
+hastiness, released.
+
+Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified
+his enquiries into Indian conditions.  They too turned for the most
+part on his facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt
+desire for human brotherhood.  At last indeed came an affair that
+refused ultimately to remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil
+that invoked newspaper articles and heated controversies.
+
+The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
+attraction and irritation.  He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
+intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
+infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India
+into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to
+the other.  "I came to see India," he wrote, "and there is no India.
+There is a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin
+in the air, quietly scorning everybody else."
+
+His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste
+began with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had
+turned an Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and
+culminated in a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness
+at Benares, who had thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner
+because Benham's shadow had fallen upon it.
+
+"You unendurable snob!" said Benham, and then lapsing into the
+forceful and inadvisable: "By Heaven, you SHALL eat it! . . ."
+
+
+
+8
+
+
+Benham's detestation of human divisions and hostilities was so deep
+in his character as to seem almost instinctive.  But he had too a
+very clear reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in
+human continuity in his sense of the gathering dangers they now
+involve.  They had always, he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred,
+misery and the destruction of human dignity, but the new conditions
+of life that have been brought about by modern science were making
+them far more dangerous than they had ever been before.  He believed
+that the evil and horror of war was becoming more and more
+tremendous with every decade, and that the free play of national
+prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness that seems to be
+inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate catastrophe,
+unless a real international aristocracy could be brought into being
+to prevent it.
+
+In the drawer full of papers labelled "Politics," White found a
+paper called "The Metal Beast."  It showed that for a time Benham
+had been greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were
+in those days piling up in every country in Europe.  He had gone to
+Essen, and at Essen he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins
+and the great guns that were presently to smash the effete British
+fleet and open the Imperial way to London.
+
+"I could not sleep," he wrote, "on account of this man and his talk
+and the streak of hatred in his talk.  He distressed me not because
+he seemed exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary.  I realized
+that he was more human than I was, and that only killing and killing
+could come out of such humanity.  I thought of the great ugly guns I
+had seen, and of the still greater guns he had talked about, and how
+gloatingly he thought of the destruction they could do.  I felt as I
+used to feel about that infernal stallion that had killed a man with
+its teeth and feet, a despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in
+life.  And this creature who had so disturbed me was only a beastly
+snuffy little man in an ill-fitting frock-coat, who laid his knife
+and fork by their tips on the edge of his plate, and picked his
+teeth with gusto and breathed into my face as he talked to me.  The
+commonest of representative men.  I went about that Westphalian
+country after that, with the conviction that headless, soulless,
+blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all about me.  I felt
+that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest of black
+dragons.  They were crouching here and away there in France and
+England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed
+up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks
+are hooded. . . .  And I had never thought very much about them
+before, and there they were, waiting until some human fool like that
+frock-coated thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a
+million, saw fit to call them out to action.  Just out of hatred and
+nationalism and faction. . . ."
+
+Then came a queer fancy.
+
+"Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see
+it more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for
+the happiness of life.  It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an
+enormous plot of the rebel metals against sensation.  That is why in
+particular half-living people seem to love these things.  La
+Ferriere was a fastness of the kind of tyranny that passes out of
+human experience, the tyranny of the strong man over men.  Essen
+comes, the new thing, the tyranny of the strong machine. . . .
+
+"Science is either slave or master.  These people--I mean the German
+people and militarist people generally--have no real mastery over
+the scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride.  The
+monster of steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe
+captive.  It has persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they
+must follow the logic of its path.  Whither? . . .  Only kingship
+will ever master that beast of steel which has got loose into the
+world.  Nothing but the sense of unconquerable kingship in us all
+will ever dare withstand it. . . .  Men must be kingly aristocrats--
+it isn't MAY be now, it is MUST be--or, these confederated metals,
+these things of chemistry and metallurgy, these explosives and
+mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of our race into
+mere red-streaked froth and filth. . . ."
+
+Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast's release.
+Would it ever be given blood?
+
+"Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great
+war that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is
+with a note of incredulity that one tells oneself, 'After all this
+war may happen.  But can it happen?'"
+
+He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war
+would ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident
+to White that he wanted very much to persuade himself against that
+idea.  It was too disagreeable for him to think it probable.  The
+paper was dated 1910.  It was in October, 1914, that White, who was
+still working upon the laborious uncertain account of Benham's life
+and thought he has recently published, read what Benham had written.
+Benham concluded that the common-sense of the world would hold up
+this danger until reason could get "to the head of things."
+
+"There are already mighty forces in Germany," Benham wrote, "that
+will struggle very powerfully to avoid a war.  And these forces
+increase.  Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama
+and the display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble
+people. . . .  I have talked with Germans of the better kind. . . .
+You cannot have a whole nation of Christophes. . . .  There also the
+true knighthood discovers itself. . . .  I do not believe this war
+will overtake us."
+
+"WELL!" said White.
+
+"I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better," the notes
+went on.
+
+But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve.  Other
+things were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was
+too late for them. . . .
+
+"It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over
+Europe, because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the
+blood of a people, because a few crude ideas go inadequately
+controlled. . . .  Does no one see what that metallic beast will do
+if they once let it loose?  It will trample cities; it will devour
+nations. . . ."
+
+White read this on the 9th of October, 1914.  One crumpled evening
+paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: "Rain of
+Incendiary Shells.  Antwerp Ablaze."  Another declared untruthfully
+but impressively: "Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City."
+
+He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them
+and turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he
+had no data at all--as every one did at that time--before he was
+able to go on with Benham's manuscripts.
+
+These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like
+finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between
+the pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked
+out from a heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their
+fill. . . .
+
+"How can we ever begin over again?" said White, and sat for a long
+time staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting,
+forgetting too that men who are tired and weary die, and that new
+men are born to succeed them. . . .
+
+"We have to begin over again," said White at last, and took up
+Benham's papers where he had laid them down. . . .
+
+
+
+9
+
+
+One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth
+Limitation was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social
+Position.  This section alone was manifestly expanding into a large
+treatise upon the psychology of economic organization. . . .
+
+It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important
+part played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of
+human affairs.  This was a very natural result of his peculiar
+social circumstances.  Most people born to wealth and ease take the
+established industrial system as the natural method in human
+affairs; it is only very reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy
+and disinterestedness that they can be brought to realize that it is
+natural only in the sense that it has grown up and come about, and
+necessary only because nobody is strong and clever enough to
+rearrange it.  Their experience of it is a satisfactory experience.
+On the other hand, the better off one is, the wider is one's outlook
+and the more alert one is to see the risks and dangers of
+international dissensions.  Travel and talk to foreigners open one's
+eyes to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become
+conceivable.  It is in the nature of things that socialists and
+labour parties should minimize international obligations and
+necessities, and equally so that autocracies and aristocracies and
+plutocracies should be negligent of and impatient about social
+reform.
+
+But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker
+and director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful
+humanity and enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned
+opportunity.  It is a far profounder and subtler conflict than any
+other in human affairs.  "I can foresee a time," he wrote, "when the
+greater national and racial hatreds may all be so weakened as to be
+no longer a considerable source of human limitation and misery, when
+the suspicions of complexion and language and social habit are
+allayed, and when the element of hatred and aggression may be clean
+washed out of most religious cults, but I do not begin to imagine a
+time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there will not be
+great friction between those who employ, those who direct collective
+action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in
+industrialism.  This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due
+very largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort
+of organization.  Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass
+and self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so
+deeply seated, so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be
+cheerfully obedient and modestly directive in war time, there is no
+reason why ultimately they should not be so in the business of
+peace.  But I do not understand the elements of the methods by which
+this state of affairs can be brought about.
+
+"If I were to confess this much to an intelligent working man I know
+that at once he would answer 'Socialism,' but Socialism is no more a
+solution of this problem than eating is a solution when one is lost
+in the wilderness and hungry.  Of course everybody with any
+intelligence wants Socialism, everybody, that is to say, wants to
+see all human efforts directed to the common good and a common end,
+but brought face to face with practical problems Socialism betrays a
+vast insufficiency of practical suggestions.  I do not say that
+Socialism would not work, but I do say that so far Socialists have
+failed to convince me that they could work it.  The substitution of
+a stupid official for a greedy proprietor may mean a vanished
+dividend, a limited output and no other human advantage whatever.
+Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent gesture, inspiring,
+encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not very helpful, towards the
+vast problem of moral and material adjustment before the race.  That
+problem is incurably miscellaneous and intricate, and only by great
+multitudes of generous workers, one working at this point and one at
+that, secretly devoted knights of humanity, hidden and dispersed
+kings, unaware of one another, doubting each his right to count
+himself among those who do these kingly services, is this elaborate
+rightening of work and guidance to be done."
+
+So from these most fundamental social difficulties he came back to
+his panacea.  All paths and all enquiries led him back to his
+conception of aristocracy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted,
+self-examining yet secret, making no personal nor class pretences,
+as the supreme need not only of the individual but the world.
+
+
+
+10
+
+
+It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal which had brought the two
+schoolfellows together again.  White had been on his way to
+Zimbabwe.  An emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had driven
+him to seek consolations in strange scenery and mysterious
+desolations.  It was as if Zimbabwe called to him.  Benham had come
+to South Africa to see into the question of Indian immigration, and
+he was now on his way to meet Amanda in London.  Neither man had
+given much heed to the gathering social conflict on the Rand until
+the storm burst about them.  There had been a few paragraphs in the
+papers about a dispute upon a point of labour etiquette, a question
+of the recognition of Trade Union officials, a thing that impressed
+them both as technical, and then suddenly a long incubated quarrel
+flared out in rioting and violence, the burning of houses and
+furniture, attacks on mines, attempts to dynamite trains.  White
+stayed in Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded up
+country by the railway strike that was among the possibilities of
+the situation.  Benham stayed because he was going to London very
+reluctantly, and he was glad of this justification for a few days'
+delay.  The two men found themselves occupying adjacent tables in
+the Sherborough Hotel, and White was the first to recognize the
+other.  They came together with a warmth and readiness of intimacy
+that neither would have displayed in London.
+
+White had not seen Benham since the social days of Amanda at
+Lancaster Gate, and he was astonished at the change a few years had
+made in him.  The peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair
+had become more marked, his skin was deader, his features seemed
+more prominent and his expression intenser.  His eyes were very
+bright and more sunken under his brows.  He had suffered from yellow
+fever in the West Indies, and these it seemed were the marks left by
+that illness.  And he was much more detached from the people about
+him; less attentive to the small incidents of life, more occupied
+with inner things.  He greeted White with a confidence that White
+was one day to remember as pathetic.
+
+"It is good to meet an old friend," Benham said.  "I have lost
+friends.  And I do not make fresh ones.  I go about too much by
+myself, and I do not follow the same tracks that other people are
+following. . . ."
+
+What track was he following?  It was now that White first heard of
+the Research Magnificent.  He wanted to know what Benham was doing,
+and Benham after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his
+interest in insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions.
+"It is, of course, a part of something else," he amplified.  He was
+writing a book, "an enormous sort of book."  He laughed with a touch
+of shyness.  It was about "everything," about how to live and how
+not to live.  And "aristocracy, and all sorts of things."  White was
+always curious about other people's books.  Benham became earnest
+and more explicit under encouragement, and to talk about his book
+was soon to talk about himself.  In various ways, intentionally and
+inadvertently, he told White much.  These chance encounters, these
+intimacies of the train and hotel, will lead men at times to a stark
+frankness of statement they would never permit themselves with
+habitual friends.
+
+About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little,
+considering how insistent it was becoming.  But the wide
+propositions of the Research Magnificent, with its large
+indifference to immediate occurrences, its vast patience, its
+tremendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in White's memory
+with the bitterness, narrowness and resentment of the events about
+them.  For him the thought of that first discussion of this vast
+inchoate book into which Benham's life was flowering, and which he
+was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a fringe of vivid
+little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and
+afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring centres of
+disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, of the muffled
+galloping of troops through the broad dusty street in the night, of
+groups of men standing and watching down straight broad roads, roads
+that ended in groups of chimneys and squat buildings of corrugated
+iron.  And once there was a marching body of white men in the
+foreground and a complicated wire fence, and a clustering mass of
+Kaffirs watching them over this fence and talking eagerly amongst
+themselves.
+
+"All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,"
+said Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation. . . .
+
+But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt
+that it was more than that.  Always he kept the tail of his eye upon
+that eventful background while Benham talked to him.
+
+When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the
+background the greater share of his attention. . . .
+
+
+
+11
+
+
+It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that
+the full values came to very many things that Benham said during
+these last conversations.  The papers fitted in with his memories of
+their long talks like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk
+had repeated the private writings in which he had first digested his
+ideas that it was presently almost impossible to disentangle what
+had been said and understood at Johannesburg from the fuller
+statement of those patched and corrected manuscripts.  The two
+things merged in White's mind as he read.  The written text took
+upon itself a resonance of Benham's voice; it eked out the hints and
+broken sentences of his remembered conversation.
+
+But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their
+mere marked absence an impression on White's mind.  And occasionally
+after Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an
+occasional aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men
+who restrain themselves from betraying a preoccupation.  He would
+say nothing about Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant
+to speak of Prothero, and another peculiarity was that he referred
+perhaps half a dozen times or more to the idea that he was a "prig."
+He seemed to be defending himself against some inner accusation,
+some unconquerable doubt of the entire adventure of his life.  These
+half hints and hints by omission exercised the quick intuitions of
+White's mind very keenly, and he drew far closer to an understanding
+of Benham's reserves than Benham ever suspected. . . .
+
+At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
+completely justified in his treatment of her.  She had betrayed him
+and he had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control.  He had
+no doubt that he had punished her very effectively, and it was only
+after he had been travelling in China with Prothero for some time
+and in the light of one or two chance phrases in her letters that he
+began to have doubts whether he ought to have punished her at all.
+And one night at Shanghai he had a dream in which she stood before
+him, dishevelled and tearful, his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda,
+and said that she was dirty and shameful and spoilt for ever,
+because he had gone away from her.  Afterwards the dream became
+absurd: she showed him the black leopard's fur as though it was a
+rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the leopard skin that had
+been so bright and wonderful such a little time ago, and he awoke
+before he could answer her, and for a long time he was full of
+unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate
+unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd.  She had spoilt
+her own fur.  But what was more penetrating and distressing in this
+dream was not so much the case Amanda stated as the atmosphere of
+unconquerable intimacy between them, as though they still belonged
+to each other, soul to soul, as though nothing that had happened
+afterwards could have destroyed their common responsibility and the
+common interest of their first unstinted union.  She was hurt, and
+of course he was hurt.  He began to see that his marriage to Amanda
+was still infinitely more than a technical bond.
+
+And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether
+she realized anything of the sort.  Her letters fluctuated very much
+in tone, but at times they were as detached and guarded as a
+schoolgirl writing to a cousin.  Then it seemed to Benham an
+extraordinary fraud on her part that she should presume to come into
+his dream with an entirely deceptive closeness and confidence.  She
+began to sound him in these latter letters upon the possibility of
+divorce.  This, which he had been quite disposed to concede in
+London, now struck him as an outrageous suggestion.  He wrote to ask
+her why, and she responded exasperatingly that she thought it was
+"better."  But, again, why better?  It is remarkable that although
+his mind had habituated itself to the idea that Easton was her lover
+in London, her thought of being divorced, no doubt to marry again,
+filled him with jealous rage.  She asked him to take the blame in
+the divorce proceedings.  There, again, he found himself ungenerous.
+He did not want to do that.  Why should he do that?  As a matter of
+fact he was by no means reconciled to the price he had paid for his
+Research Magnificent; he regretted his Amanda acutely.  He was
+regretting her with a regret that grew when by all the rules of life
+it ought to be diminishing.
+
+It was in consequence of that regret and his controversies with
+Prothero while they travelled together in China that his concern
+about what he called priggishness arose.  It is a concern that one
+may suppose has a little afflicted every reasonably self-conscious
+man who has turned from the natural passionate personal life to
+religion or to public service or any abstract devotion.  These
+things that are at least more extensive than the interests of flesh
+and blood have a trick of becoming unsubstantial, they shine
+gloriously and inspiringly upon the imagination, they capture one
+and isolate one and then they vanish out of sight.  It is far easier
+to be entirely faithful to friend or lover than it is to be faithful
+to a cause or to one's country or to a religion.  In the glow of
+one's first service that larger idea may be as closely spontaneous
+as a handclasp, but in the darkness that comes as the glow dies away
+there is a fearful sense of unreality.  It was in such dark moments
+that Benham was most persecuted by his memories of Amanda and most
+distressed by this suspicion that the Research Magnificent was a
+priggishness, a pretentious logomachy.  Prothero could indeed hint
+as much so skilfully that at times the dream of nobility seemed an
+insult to the sunshine, to the careless laughter of children, to the
+good light in wine and all the warm happiness of existence.  And
+then Amanda would peep out of the dusk and whisper, "Of course if
+you could leave me--!  Was I not LIFE?  Even now if you cared to
+come back to me--  For I loved you best and loved you still, old
+Cheetah, long after you had left me to follow your dreams. . . .
+Even now I am drifting further into lies and the last shreds of
+dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful leopard I am now,
+who was once clean and bright. . . .  You could come back, Cheetah,
+and you could save me yet.  If you would love me. . . ."
+
+In certain moods she could wring his heart by such imagined
+speeches, the very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that
+his ear had loved, and not only could she distress him, but when
+Benham was in this heartache mood, when once she had set him going,
+then his little mother also would rise against him, touchingly
+indignant, with her blue eyes bright with tears; and his frowsty
+father would back towards him and sit down complaining that he was
+neglected, and even little Mrs. Skelmersdale would reappear, bravely
+tearful on her chair looking after him as he slunk away from her
+through Kensington Gardens; indeed every personal link he had ever
+had to life could in certain moods pull him back through the door of
+self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching and accusing himself
+of harshness and self-concentration.  The very kittens of his
+childhood revived forgotten moments of long-repented hardness.  For
+a year before Prothero was killed there were these heartaches.  That
+tragedy gave them their crowning justification.  All these people
+said in this form or that, "You owed a debt to us, you evaded it,
+you betrayed us, you owed us life out of yourself, love and
+services, and you have gone off from us all with this life that was
+ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of the world, and
+with empty phantoms of power and destiny.  All this was
+intellectualization.  You sacrificed us to the thin things of the
+mind.  There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like
+you may lay hold upon.  The rule of the world is a fortuitous result
+of incalculably multitudinous forces.  But all of us you could have
+made happier.  You could have spared us distresses.  Prothero died
+because of you.  Presently it will be the turn of your father, your
+mother--Amanda perhaps. . . ."
+
+He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several
+memoranda about priggishness that White read and came near to
+understanding.  In spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham
+was making up his mind to be a prig.  He weighed the cold
+uningratiating virtues of priggishness against his smouldering
+passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate sympathy for
+Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and he made
+his choice.  But it was a reluctant choice.
+
+One fragment began in the air.  "Of course I had made myself
+responsible for her life.  But it was, you see, such a confoundedly
+energetic life, as vigorous and as slippery as an eel. . . .  Only
+by giving all my strength to her could I have held Amanda. . . .  So
+what was the good of trying to hold Amanda? . . .
+
+"All one's people have this sort of claim upon one.  Claims made by
+their pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and
+dependences.  You've no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand
+freedom when it means snapping and tearing the silly suffering
+tendrils they have wrapped about you.  The true aristocrat I think
+will have enough grasp, enough steadiness, to be kind and right to
+every human being and still do the work that ought to be his
+essential life.  I see that now.  It's one of the things this last
+year or so of loneliness has made me realize; that in so far as I
+have set out to live the aristocratic life I have failed.  Instead
+I've discovered it--and found myself out.  I'm an overstrung man.  I
+go harshly and continuously for one idea.  I live as I ride.  I
+blunder through my fences, I take off too soon.  I've no natural
+ease of mind or conduct or body.  I am straining to keep hold of a
+thing too big for me and do a thing beyond my ability.  Only after
+Prothero's death was it possible for me to realize the prig I have
+always been, first as regards him and then as regards Amanda and my
+mother and every one.  A necessary unavoidable priggishness. . . ."
+I do not see how certain things can be done without prigs, people,
+that is to say, so concentrated and specialized in interest as to be
+a trifle inhuman, so resolved as to be rather rhetorical and
+forced. . . .  All things must begin with clumsiness, there is
+no assurance about pioneers. . . .
+
+"Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain
+aristocracy. . . .  But the very essence of aristocracy, as I
+conceive it, is that it does not explain nor talk about itself. . . .
+
+"After all it doesn't matter what I am. . . .  It's just a private
+vexation that I haven't got where I meant to get.  That does not
+affect the truth I have to tell. . . .
+
+"If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one
+must speak the truth.  I have worked out some very considerable
+things in my research, and the time has come when I must set them
+out clearly and plainly.  That is my job anyhow.  My journey to
+London to release Amanda will be just the end of my adolescence and
+the beginning of my real life.  It will release me from my last
+entanglement with the fellow creatures I have always failed to make
+happy. . . .  It's a detail in the work. . . .  And I shall go on.
+
+"But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical
+operation.
+
+"It's very like that.  A surgical operation, and when it is over
+perhaps I shall think no more about it.
+
+"And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done.
+So far I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of
+living.  I must begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can
+upon the details, and, presently, I shall see more clearly where
+other men are working to the same ends. . . ."
+
+
+
+12
+
+
+Benham's expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle
+between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble
+life to the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and
+sympathy for the earthliness of that inglorious little don.
+Although Benham insisted upon the dominance of life by noble
+imaginations and relentless reasonableness, he would never
+altogether abandon the materialism of life.  Prothero had once said
+to him, "You are the advocate of the brain and I of the belly.
+Only, only we respect each other."  And at another time, "You fear
+emotions and distrust sensations.  I invite them.  You do not drink
+gin because you think it would make you weep.  But if I could not
+weep in any other way I would drink gin."  And it was under the
+influence of Prothero that Benham turned from the haughty
+intellectualism, the systematized superiorities and refinements, the
+caste marks and defensive dignities of India to China, that great
+teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow humanity.
+
+Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout of elevated idealism.
+It was only very slowly that he reconciled his mind to the idea of
+an entirely solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream.  For some
+time as he went about the world he was trying to bring himself into
+relationship with the advanced thinkers, the liberal-minded people
+who seemed to promise at least a mental and moral co-operation.  Yet
+it is difficult to see what co-operation was possible unless it was
+some sort of agreement that presently they should all shout
+together.  And it was after a certain pursuit of Rabindranath
+Tagore, whom he met in Hampstead, that a horror of perfect manners
+and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled from that starry calm
+to the rich uncleanness of the most undignified fellow of Trinity.
+And as an advocate and exponent of the richness of the lower levels
+of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of the uttermost
+refinements of pride, Prothero went with Benham by way of Siberia to
+the Chinese scene.
+
+Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner-table in their
+choice of food and drink.  Benham was always wary and Prothero
+always appreciative.  It peeped out in the distribution of their
+time, in the direction of their glances.  Whenever women walked
+about, Prothero gave way to a sort of ethnological excitement.
+"That girl--a wonderful racial type."  But in Moscow he was
+sentimental.  He insisted on going again to the Cosmopolis Bazaar,
+and when he had ascertained that Anna Alexievna had vanished and
+left no trace he prowled the streets until the small hours.
+
+In the eastward train he talked intermittently of her.  "I should
+have defied Cambridge," he said.
+
+But at every stopping station he got out upon the platform
+ethnologically alert. . . .
+
+Theoretically Benham was disgusted with Prothero.  Really he was not
+disgusted at all.  There was something about Prothero like a
+sparrow, like a starling, like a Scotch terrier. . . .  These, too,
+are morally objectionable creatures that do not disgust. . . .
+
+Prothero discoursed much upon the essential goodness of Russians.
+He said they were a people of genius, that they showed it in their
+faults and failures just as much as in their virtues and
+achievements.  He extolled the "germinating disorder" of Moscow far
+above the "implacable discipline" of Berlin.  Only a people of
+inferior imagination, a base materialist people, could so maintain
+its attention upon precision and cleanliness.  Benham was roused to
+defence against this paradox.  "But all exaltation neglects," said
+Prothero.  "No religion has ever boasted that its saints were spick
+and span."  This controversy raged between them in the streets of
+Irkutsk.  It was still burning while they picked their way through
+the indescribable filth of Pekin.
+
+"You say that all this is a fine disdain for material things," said
+Benham.  "But look out there!"
+
+Apt to their argument a couple of sturdy young women came shuffling
+along, cleaving the crowd in the narrow street by virtue of a single
+word and two brace of pails of human ordure.
+
+"That is not a fine disdain for material things," said Benham.
+"That is merely individualism and unsystematic living."
+
+"A mere phase of frankness.  Only frankness is left to them now.
+The Manchus crippled them, spoilt their roads and broke their
+waterways.  European intervention paralyses every attempt they make
+to establish order on their own lines.  In the Ming days China did
+not reek. . . .  And, anyhow, Benham, it's better than the silly
+waste of London. . . ."
+
+And in a little while Prothero discovered that China had tried
+Benham and found him wanting, centuries and dynasties ago.
+
+What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he asked, but the ideal
+of Confucius, the superior person, "the son of the King"?  There you
+had the very essence of Benham, the idea of self-examination, self-
+preparation under a vague Theocracy.  ("Vaguer," said Benham, "for
+the Confucian Heaven could punish and reward.")  Even the elaborate
+sham modesty of the two dreams was the same.  Benham interrupted and
+protested with heat.  And this Confucian idea of the son of the
+King, Prothero insisted, had been the cause of China's paralysis.
+"My idea of nobility is not traditional but expectant," said Benham.
+"After all, Confucianism has held together a great pacific state far
+longer than any other polity has ever lasted.  I'll accept your
+Confucianism.  I've not the slightest objection to finding China
+nearer salvation than any other land.  Do but turn it round so that
+it looks to the future and not to the past, and it will be the best
+social and political culture in the world.  That, indeed, is what is
+happening.  Mix Chinese culture with American enterprise and you
+will have made a new lead for mankind."
+
+From that Benham drove on to discoveries.  "When a man thinks of the
+past he concentrates on self; when he thinks of the future he
+radiates from self.  Call me a neo-Confucian; with the cone opening
+forward away from me, instead of focussing on me. . . ."
+
+"You make me think of an extinguisher," said Prothero.
+
+"You know I am thinking of a focus," said Benham.  "But all your
+thought now has become caricature. . . .  You have stopped thinking.
+You are fighting after making up your mind. . . ."
+
+Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham's prompt endorsement of
+his Chinese identification.  He had hoped it would be exasperating.
+He tried to barb his offence.  He amplified the indictment.  All
+cultures must be judged by their reaction and fatigue products, and
+Confucianism had produced formalism, priggishness, humbug. . . .  No
+doubt its ideals had had their successes; they had unified China,
+stamped the idea of universal peace and good manners upon the
+greatest mass of population in the world, paved the way for much
+beautiful art and literature and living.  "But in the end, all your
+stern orderliness, Benham," said Prothero, "only leads to me.  The
+human spirit rebels against this everlasting armour on the soul.
+After Han came T'ang.  Have you never read Ling Po?  There's scraps
+of him in English in that little book you have--what is it?--the
+LUTE OF JADE?  He was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam
+after the Prophet.  Life must relax at last. . . ."
+
+"No!" cried Benham.  "If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it
+is creative, no. . . ."
+
+Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven
+to closer enquiries into Chinese thought.  He tried particularly to
+get to mental grips with English-speaking Chinese.  "We still know
+nothing of China," said Prothero.  "Most of the stuff we have been
+told about this country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle.  We
+send merchants from Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what
+doesn't remind them of these delectable standards seems either funny
+to them or wicked.  I admit the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to
+speak, in the ancient characters and the ancient traditions, but for
+all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what all the rest of the world has
+still to find and get.  When they begin to speak and write in a
+modern way and handle modern things and break into the soil they
+have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find just how much
+it is behind. . . .  Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not such
+fools as that, but LIFE. . . ."
+
+Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.
+
+He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
+wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
+foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities,
+delirious religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with
+loaded guns, China, even more than America, develops steadily into a
+massive possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism. . . .
+
+The two men followed their associated and disconnected paths.
+Through Benham's chance speeches and notes, White caught glimpses,
+as one might catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that
+bilateral adventure.  He saw Benham in conversation with liberal-
+minded mandarins, grave-faced, bald-browed persons with disciplined
+movements, who sat with their hands thrust into their sleeves
+talking excellent English; while Prothero pursued enquiries of an
+intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of a more confidential
+type.  And, presently, Prothero began to discover and discuss the
+merits of opium.
+
+For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, if one is to
+find the solution of life's problem in the rational enjoyment of
+one's sensations, why should one not use opium?  It is art
+materialized.  It gives tremendous experiences with a minimum of
+exertion, and if presently its gifts diminish one need but increase
+the quantity.  Moreover, it quickens the garrulous mind, and
+steadies the happiness of love.  Across the varied adventures of
+Benham's journey in China fell the shadow first of a suspicion and
+then of a certainty. . . .
+
+The perfected and ancient vices of China wrapped about Prothero like
+some tainted but scented robe, and all too late Benham sought to
+drag him away.  And then in a passion of disgust turned from him.
+
+"To this," cried Benham, "one comes!  Save for pride and
+fierceness!"
+
+"Better this than cruelty," said Prothero talking quickly and
+clearly because of the evil thing in his veins.  "You think that you
+are the only explorer of life, Benham, but while you toil up the
+mountains I board the house-boat and float down the stream.  For you
+the stars, for me the music and the lanterns.  You are the son of a
+mountaineering don, and I am a Chinese philosopher of the riper
+school.  You force yourself beyond fear of pain, and I force myself
+beyond fear of consequences.  What are we either of us but children
+groping under the black cloak of our Maker?--who will not blind us
+with his light.  Did he not give us also these lusts, the keen knife
+and the sweetness, these sensations that are like pineapple smeared
+with saltpetre, like salted olives from heaven, like being flayed
+with delight. . . .  And did he not give us dreams fantastic beyond
+any lust whatever?  What is the good of talking?  Speak to your own
+kind.  I have gone, Benham.  I am lost already.  There is no
+resisting any more, since I have drugged away resistance.  Why then
+should I come back?  I know now the symphonies of the exalted
+nerves; I can judge; and I say better lie and hear them to the end
+than come back again to my old life, to my little tin-whistle solo,
+my--effort!  My EFFORT! . . .  I ruin my body.  I know.  But what of
+that? . . .  I shall soon be thin and filthy.  What of the grape-
+skin when one has had the pulp?"
+
+"But," said Benham, "the cleanness of life!"
+
+"While I perish," said Prothero still more wickedly, "I say good
+things. . . ."
+
+
+
+13
+
+
+White had a vision of a great city with narrow crowded streets, hung
+with lank banners and gay with vertical vermilion labels, and of a
+pleasant large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, a
+garden set with artificial stones and with beasts and men and
+lanterns of white porcelain, a garden which overlooked this city.
+Here it was that Benham stayed and talked with his host, a man robed
+in marvellous silks and subtle of speech even in the European
+languages he used, and meanwhile Prothero, it seemed, had gone down
+into the wickedness of the town below.  It was a very great town
+indeed, spreading for miles along the banks of a huge river, a river
+that divided itself indolently into three shining branches so as to
+make islands of the central portion of the place.  And on this river
+swarmed for ever a vast flotilla of ships and boats, boats in which
+people lived, boats in which they sought pleasure, moored places of
+assembly, high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger sampans, cargo
+craft, such a water town in streets and lanes, endless miles of it,
+as no other part of the world save China can display.  In the
+daylight it was gay with countless sunlit colours embroidered upon a
+fabric of yellow and brown, at night it glittered with a hundred
+thousand lights that swayed and quivered and were reflected
+quiveringly upon the black flowing waters.
+
+And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger
+who was for some reason very vividly realized by White's
+imagination.  He was a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken
+cheeks that made his cheek bones very prominent, and gave his thin-
+lipped mouth something of the geniality of a skull, and the arm he
+thrust out of his yellow robe to hand Prothero's message to Benham
+was lean as a pole.  So he stood out in White's imagination, against
+the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs and blue haze of the
+great town below, and was with one exception the distinctest thing
+in the story.  The message he bore was scribbled by Prothero himself
+in a nerveless scrawl: "Send a hundred dollars by this man.  I am in
+a frightful fix."
+
+Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage
+of opium, and something in this message stirred his facile
+indignation.  Twice before he had had similar demands.  And on the
+whole they had seemed to him to be unreasonable demands.  He was
+astonished that while he was sitting and talking of the great world-
+republic of the future and the secret self-directed aristocracy that
+would make it possible, his own friend, his chosen companion, should
+thus, by this inglorious request and this ungainly messenger,
+disavow him.  He felt a wave of intense irritation.
+
+"No," he said, "I will not."
+
+And he was too angry to express himself in any language
+understandable by his messenger.
+
+His host intervened and explained after a few questions that the
+occasion was serious.  Prothero, it seemed, had been gambling.
+
+"No," said Benham.  "He is shameless.  Let him do what he can."
+
+The messenger was still reluctant to go.
+
+And scarcely had he gone before misgivings seized Benham.
+
+"Where IS your friend?" asked the mandarin.
+
+"I don't know," said Benham.
+
+"But they will keep him!  They may do all sorts of things when they
+find he is lying to them."
+
+"Lying to them?"
+
+"About your help."
+
+"Stop that man," cried Benham suddenly realizing his mistake.  But
+when the servants went to stop the messenger their intentions were
+misunderstood, and the man dashed through the open gate of the
+garden and made off down the winding road.
+
+"Stop him!" cried Benham, and started in pursuit, suddenly afraid
+for Prothero.
+
+The Chinese are a people of great curiosity, and a small pebble
+sometimes starts an avalanche. . . .
+
+White pieced together his conception of the circles of disturbance
+that spread out from Benham's pursuit of Prothero's flying
+messenger.
+
+For weeks and months the great town had been uneasy in all its ways
+because of the insurgent spirits from the south and the disorder
+from the north, because of endless rumours and incessant intrigue.
+The stupid manoeuvres of one European "power" against another, the
+tactlessness of missionaries, the growing Chinese disposition to
+meet violence and force with violence and force, had fermented and
+brewed the possibility of an outbreak.  The sudden resolve of Benham
+to get at once to Prothero was like the firing of a mine.  This
+tall, pale-faced, incomprehensible stranger charging through the
+narrow streets that led to the pleasure-boats in the south river
+seemed to many a blue-clad citizen like the White Peril embodied.
+Behind him came the attendants of the rich man up the hill; but they
+surely were traitors to help this stranger.
+
+Before Benham could at all realize what was happening he found his
+way to the river-boat on which he supposed Prothero to be detained,
+barred by a vigorous street fight.  Explanations were impossible; he
+joined in the fight.
+
+For three days that fight developed round the mystery of Prothero's
+disappearance.
+
+It was a complicated struggle into which the local foreign traders
+on the river-front and a detachment of modern drilled troops from
+the up-river barracks were presently drawn.  It was a struggle that
+was never clearly explained, and at the end of it they found
+Prothero's body flung out upon a waste place near a little temple on
+the river bank, stabbed while he was asleep. . . .
+
+And from the broken fragments of description that Benham let fall,
+White had an impression of him hunting for all those three days
+through the strange places of a Chinese city, along narrow passages,
+over queer Venetian-like bridges, through the vast spaces of empty
+warehouses, in the incense-scented darkness of temple yards, along
+planks that passed to the dark hulls of secret barges, in quick-
+flying boats that slipped noiselessly among the larger craft, and
+sometimes he hunted alone, sometimes in company, sometimes black
+figures struggled in the darkness against dim-lit backgrounds and
+sometimes a swarm of shining yellow faces screamed and shouted
+through the torn paper windows. . . .  And then at the end of this
+confused effect of struggle, this Chinese kinematograph film, one
+last picture jerked into place and stopped and stood still, a white
+wall in the sunshine come upon suddenly round a corner, a dirty
+flagged passage and a stiff crumpled body that had for the first
+time an inexpressive face. . . .
+
+
+
+14
+
+
+Benham sat at a table in the smoking-room of the Sherborough Hotel
+at Johannesburg and told of these things.  White watched him from an
+armchair.  And as he listened he noted again the intensification of
+Benham's face, the darkness under his brows, the pallor of his skin,
+the touch of red in his eyes.  For there was still that red gleam in
+Benham's eyes; it shone when he looked out of a darkness into a
+light.  And he sat forward with his arms folded under him, or moved
+his long lean hand about over the things on the table.
+
+"You see," he said, "this is a sort of horror in my mind.  Things
+like this stick in my mind.  I am always seeing Prothero now, and it
+will take years to get this scar off my memory again.  Once before--
+about a horse, I had the same kind of distress.  And it makes me
+tender, sore-minded about everything.  It will go, of course, in the
+long run, and it's just like any other ache that lays hold of one.
+One can't cure it.  One has to get along with it. . . .
+
+"I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, but how was I to
+know then that it was so imperative to send that money? . . .
+
+"At the time it seemed just pandering to his vices. . . .
+
+"I was angry.  I shall never subdue that kind of hastiness
+altogether.  It takes me by surprise.  Before the messenger was out
+of sight I had repented. . . .
+
+"I failed him.  I have gone about in the world dreaming of
+tremendous things and failing most people.  My wife too. . . ."
+
+He stopped talking for a little time and folded his arms tight and
+stared hard in front of himself, his lips compressed.
+
+"You see, White," he said, with a kind of setting of the teeth,
+"this is the sort of thing one has to stand.  Life is imperfect.
+Nothing can be done perfectly.  And on the whole--"  He spoke still
+more slowly, "I would go through again with the very same things
+that have hurt my people.  If I had to live over again.  I would try
+to do the things without hurting the people, but I would do the
+things anyhow.  Because I'm raw with remorse, it does not follow
+that on the whole I am not doing right.  Right doing isn't balm.  If
+I could have contrived not to hurt these people as I have done, it
+would have been better, just as it would be better to win a battle
+without any killed or wounded.  I was clumsy with them and they
+suffered, I suffer for their suffering, but still I have to stick to
+the way I have taken.  One's blunders are accidents.  If one thing
+is clearer than another it is that the world isn't accident-proof. . . .
+
+"But I wish I had sent those dollars to Prothero. . . .  God!  White,
+but I lie awake at night thinking of that messenger as he turned
+away. . . .  Trying to stop him. . . .
+
+"I didn't send those dollars.  So fifty or sixty people were killed
+and many wounded. . . .  There for all practical purposes the thing
+ends.  Perhaps it will serve to give me a little charity for some
+other fool's haste and blundering. . . .
+
+"I couldn't help it, White.  I couldn't help it. . . .
+
+"The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes on.  One thinks, one
+learns, one adds one's contribution of experience and understanding.
+The spirit of the race goes on to light and comprehension.  In spite
+of accidents.  In spite of individual blundering.
+
+"It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that nobility is so easy as to
+come slick and true on every occasion. . . .
+
+"If one gives oneself to any long aim one must reckon with minor
+disasters.  This Research I undertook grows and grows.  I believe in
+it more and more.  The more it asks from me the more I give to it.
+When I was a youngster I thought the thing I wanted was just round
+the corner.  I fancied I would find out the noble life in a year or
+two, just what it was, just where it took one, and for the rest of
+my life I would live it.  Finely.  But I am just one of a multitude
+of men, each one going a little wrong, each one achieving a little
+right.  And the noble life is a long, long way ahead. . . .  We are
+working out a new way of living for mankind, a new rule, a new
+conscience.  It's no small job for all of us.  There must be
+lifetimes of building up and lifetimes of pulling down and trying
+again.  Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy. . . .
+I see myself now for the little workman I am upon this tremendous
+undertaking.  And all my life hereafter goes to serve it. . . ."
+
+He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend.  He spoke with a grim
+enthusiasm.  "I'm a prig.  I'm a fanatic, White.  But I have
+something clear, something better worth going on with than any
+adventure of personal relationship could possibly be. . . ."
+
+And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the
+faith that had grown up in his mind.  He spoke with a touch of
+defiance, with the tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes
+his shame.  "I will tell you what I believe."
+
+He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow
+development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect
+until he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he
+refers his life to ends and purposes beyond himself.  An aristocrat
+must be loyal.  So it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must
+also be lucid; there it is that one has at once the demand for
+kingship and the repudiation of all existing states and kings.  In
+this manner he had come to his idea of a great world republic that
+must replace the little warring kingdoms of the present, to the
+conception of an unseen kingship ruling the whole globe, to his King
+Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth and all sane loyalty.  "There,"
+he said, "is the link of our order, the new knighthood, the new
+aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth.  There is our Prince.
+He is in me, he is in you; he is latent in all mankind.  I have
+worked this out and tried it and lived it, and I know that outwardly
+and inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else be a poor
+thing and a base one.  On great occasions and small occasions I have
+failed myself a thousand times, but no failure lasts if your faith
+lasts.  What I have learnt, what I have thought out and made sure, I
+want now to tell the world.  Somehow I will tell it, as a book I
+suppose, though I do not know if I shall ever be able to make a
+book.  But I have away there in London or with me here all the
+masses of notes I have made in my search for the life that is worth
+while living. . . .  We who are self-appointed aristocrats, who are
+not ashamed of kingship, must speak to one another. . . .
+
+"We can have no organization because organizations corrupt. . . .
+
+"No recognition. . . .
+
+"But we can speak plainly. . . ."
+
+(As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and
+voices of mounted police riding past the hotel.)
+
+"But on one side your aristocracy means revolution," said White.
+"It becomes a political conspiracy."
+
+"Manifestly.  An open conspiracy.  It denies the king upon the
+stamps and the flag upon the wall.  It is the continual proclamation
+of the Republic of Mankind."
+
+
+
+15
+
+
+The earlier phases of violence in the Rand outbreak in 1913 were
+manifest rather in the outskirts of Johannesburg than at the centre.
+"Pulling out" was going on first at this mine and then that, there
+were riots in Benoni, attacks on strike breakers and the smashing up
+of a number of houses.  It was not until July the 4th that, with the
+suppression of a public meeting in the market-place, Johannesburg
+itself became the storm centre.
+
+Benham and White were present at this marketplace affair, a confused
+crowded occasion, in which a little leaven of active men stirred
+through a large uncertain multitude of decently dressed onlookers.
+The whole big square was astir, a swaying crowd of men.  A
+ramshackle platform improvised upon a trolley struggled through the
+swarming straw hats to a street corner, and there was some speaking.
+At first it seemed as though military men were using this platform,
+and then it was manifestly in possession of an excited knot of
+labour leaders with red rosettes.  The military men had said their
+say and got down.  They came close by Benham, pushing their way
+across the square.  "We've warned them," said one.  A red flag, like
+some misunderstood remark at a tea-party, was fitfully visible and
+incomprehensible behind the platform.  Somebody was either pitched
+or fell off the platform.  One could hear nothing from the speakers
+except a minute bleating. . . .
+
+Then there were shouts that the police were charging.  A number of
+mounted men trotted into the square.  The crowd began a series of
+short rushes that opened lanes for the passage of the mounted police
+as they rode to and fro.  These men trotted through the crowd,
+scattering knots of people.  They carried pick-handles, but they did
+not seem to be hitting with them.  It became clear that they aimed
+at the capture of the trolley.  There was only a feeble struggle for
+the trolley; it was captured and hauled through the scattered
+spectators in the square to the protection of a small impassive body
+of regular cavalry at the opposite corner.  Then quite a number of
+people seemed to be getting excited and fighting.  They appeared to
+be vaguely fighting the foot-police, and the police seemed to be
+vaguely pushing through them and dispersing them.  The roof of a
+little one-story shop became prominent as a centre of vigorous
+stone-throwing.
+
+It was no sort of battle.  Merely the normal inconsecutiveness of
+human affairs had become exaggerated and pugnacious.  A meeting was
+being prevented, and the police engaged in the operation were being
+pelted or obstructed.  Mostly people were just looking on.
+
+"It amounts to nothing," said Benham.  "Even if they held a meeting,
+what could happen?  Why does the Government try to stop it?"
+
+The drifting and charging and a little booing went on for some time.
+Every now and then some one clambered to a point of vantage, began a
+speech and was pulled down by policemen.  And at last across the
+confusion came an idea, like a wind across a pond.
+
+The strikers were to go to the Power Station.
+
+That had the effect of a distinct move in the game.  The Power
+Station was the centre of Johannesburg's light and energy.  There if
+anywhere it would be possible to express one's disapproval of the
+administration, one's desire to embarrass and confute it.  One could
+stop all sorts of things from the Power Station.  At any rate it was
+a repartee to the suppression of the meeting.  Everybody seemed
+gladdened by a definite project.
+
+Benham and White went with the crowd.
+
+At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the
+scattered drift of people became congested.  Gliding slowly across
+the mass came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with
+even its glass undamaged, and then another and another.  Strikers,
+with the happy expression of men who have found something expressive
+to do, were escorting the trams off the street.  They were being
+meticulously careful with them.  Never was there less mob violence
+in a riot.  They walked by the captured cars almost deferentially,
+like rough men honoured by a real lady's company.  And when White
+and Benham reached the Power House the marvel grew.  The rioters
+were already in possession and going freely over the whole place,
+and they had injured nothing.  They had stopped the engines, but
+they had not even disabled them.  Here too manifestly a majority of
+the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.
+
+"But this is the most civilized rioting," said Benham.  "It isn't
+rioting; it's drifting.  Just as things drifted in Moscow.  Because
+nobody has the rudder. . . .
+
+"What maddens me," he said, "is the democracy of the whole thing.
+White!  I HATE this modern democracy.  Democracy and inequality!
+Was there ever an absurder combination?  What is the good of a
+social order in which the men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff
+than the men underneath, the same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by
+prosperity and opportunity and the conceit that comes with
+advantage?  This trouble wants so little, just a touch of
+aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an inkling
+of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all
+this squalor and evil temper. . . .  What does all this struggle
+here amount to?  On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent
+resentment on the other; suspicion everywhere. . . .
+
+"And you know, White, at bottom THEY ALL WANT TO BE DECENT!
+
+"If only they had light enough in their brains to show them
+how.  It's such a plain job they have here too, a new city, the
+simplest industries, freedom from war, everything to make a good
+life for men, prosperity, glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in
+the air.  And mismanagement, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice,
+stupidity, poison it all.  A squabble about working on a Saturday
+afternoon, a squabble embittered by this universal shadow of miner's
+phthisis that the masters were too incapable and too mean to
+prevent.
+
+"Oh, God!" cried Benham, "when will men be princes and take hold of
+life?  When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own? . . .
+Look at this place!  Look at this place! . . .  The easy,
+accessible happiness!  The manifest prosperity.  The newness and the
+sunshine.  And the silly bitterness, the rage, the mischief and
+miseries! . . ."
+
+And then: "It's not our quarrel. . . ."
+
+"It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides.
+Life is one long struggle against the incidental.  I can feel my
+anger gathering against the Government here in spite of my reason.
+I want to go and expostulate.  I have a ridiculous idea that I ought
+to go off to Lord Gladstone or Botha and expostulate. . . .  What
+good would it do?  They move in the magic circles of their own
+limitations, an official, a politician--how would they put it?--
+'with many things to consider. . . .'
+
+"It's my weakness to be drawn into quarrels.  It's a thing I have to
+guard against. . . .
+
+"What does it all amount to?  It is like a fight between navvies in
+a tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star.  It doesn't
+concern us. . . .  Oh! it doesn't indeed concern us.  It's a scuffle
+in the darkness, and our business, the business of all brains, the
+only permanent good work is to light up the world. . . .  There will
+be mischief and hatred here and suppression and then forgetfulness,
+and then things will go on again, a little better or a little
+worse. . . ."
+
+"I'm tired of this place, White, and of all such places.  I'm tired
+of the shouting and running, the beating and shooting.  I'm sick of
+all the confusions of life's experience, which tells only of one
+need amidst an endless multitude of distresses.  I've seen my fill
+of wars and disputes and struggles.  I see now how a man may grow
+weary at last of life and its disorders, its unreal exacting
+disorders, its blunders and its remorse.  No!  I want to begin upon
+the realities I have made for myself.  For they are the realities.
+I want to go now to some quiet corner where I can polish what I have
+learnt, sort out my accumulations, be undisturbed by these
+transitory symptomatic things. . . .
+
+"What was that boy saying?  They are burning the STAR office. . . .
+Well, let them. . . ."
+
+And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things
+that hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the
+sky and the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights
+down side streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the
+making of greatness and a new great spirit in men.  All the rest of
+his life, he said, must be given to that.  He would say his thing
+plainly and honestly and afterwards other men would say it clearly
+and beautifully; here it would touch a man and there it would touch
+a man; the Invisible King in us all would find himself and know
+himself a little in this and a little in that, and at last a day
+would come, when fair things and fine things would rule the world
+and such squalor as this about them would be as impossible any more
+for men as a Stone Age Corroboree. . . .
+
+Late or soon?
+
+Benham sought for some loose large measure of time.
+
+"Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes. . . .
+
+"Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred
+years or ten thousand years?  It will never come in our lives,
+White.  Not soon enough for that.  But after that everything will be
+soon--when one comes to death then everything is at one's
+fingertips--I can feel that greater world I shall never see as one
+feels the dawn coming through the last darkness. . . ."
+
+
+
+16
+
+
+The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at
+lunch in the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the
+burning of the STAR office.  The Sherborough dining-room was on the
+first floor, and the Venetian window beside their table opened on to
+a verandah above a piazza.  As they talked they became aware of an
+excitement in the street below, shouting and running and then a
+sound of wheels and the tramp of a body of soldiers marching
+quickly.  White stood up and looked.  "They're seizing the stuff in
+the gunshops," he said, sitting down again.  "It's amazing they
+haven't done it before."
+
+They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at
+Mukden that had won Benham's admiration. . . .
+
+A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass
+smashing.  Then more revolver shots.  "That's at the big club at the
+corner, I think," said Benham and went out upon the verandah.
+
+Up and down the street mischief was afoot.  Outside the Rand Club in
+the cross street a considerable mass of people had accumulated, and
+was being hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers.  Down the
+street people were looking in the direction of the market-place and
+then suddenly a rush of figures flooded round the corner, first a
+froth of scattered individuals and then a mass, a column, marching
+with an appearance of order and waving a flag.  It was a poorly
+disciplined body, it fringed out into a swarm of sympathizers and
+spectators upon the side walk, and at the head of it two men
+disputed.  They seemed to be differing about the direction of the
+whole crowd.  Suddenly one smote the other with his fist, a blow
+that hurled him sideways, and then turned with a triumphant gesture
+to the following ranks, waving his arms in the air.  He was a tall
+lean man, hatless and collarless, greyhaired and wild-eyed.  On he
+came, gesticulating gauntly, past the hotel.
+
+And then up the street something happened.  Benham's attention was
+turned round to it by a checking, by a kind of catch in the breath,
+on the part of the advancing procession under the verandah.
+
+The roadway beyond the club had suddenly become clear.  Across it a
+dozen soldiers had appeared and dismounted methodically and lined
+out, with their carbines in readiness.  The mounted men at the club
+corner had vanished, and the people there had swayed about towards
+this new threat.  Quite abruptly the miscellaneous noises of the
+crowd ceased.  Understanding seized upon every one.
+
+These soldiers were going to fire. . . .
+
+The brown uniformed figures moved like automata; the rifle shots
+rang out almost in one report. . . .
+
+There was a rush in the crowd towards doorways and side streets, an
+enquiring pause, the darting back of a number of individuals into
+the roadway and then a derisive shouting.  Nobody had been hit.  The
+soldiers had fired in the air.
+
+"But this is a stupid game," said Benham.  "Why did they fire at
+all?"
+
+The tall man who had led the mob had run out into the middle of the
+road.  His commando was a little disposed to assume a marginal
+position, and it had to be reassured.  He was near enough for Benham
+to see his face.  For a time it looked anxious and thoughtful.  Then
+he seemed to jump to his decision.  He unbuttoned and opened his
+coat wide as if defying the soldiers.  "Shoot," he bawled, "Shoot,
+if you dare!"
+
+A little uniform movement of the soldiers answered him.  The small
+figure of the officer away there was inaudible.  The coat of the man
+below flapped like the wings of a crowing cock before a breast of
+dirty shirt, the hoarse voice cracked with excitement, "Shoot, if
+you dare.  Shoot, if you dare!  See!"
+
+Came the metallic bang of the carbines again, and in the instant the
+leader collapsed in the road, a sprawl of clothes, hit by half a
+dozen bullets.  It was an extraordinary effect.  As though the
+figure had been deflated.  It was incredible that a moment before
+this thing had been a man, an individual, a hesitating complicated
+purpose.
+
+"Good God!" cried Benham, "but--this is horrible!"
+
+The heap of garments lay still.  The red hand that stretched out
+towards the soldiers never twitched.
+
+The spectacular silence broke into a confusion of sounds, women
+shrieked, men cursed, some fled, some sought a corner from which
+they might still see, others pressed forward.  "Go for the swine!"
+bawled a voice, a third volley rattled over the heads of the people,
+and in the road below a man with a rifle halted, took aim, and
+answered the soldiers' fire.  "Look out!" cried White who was
+watching the soldiers, and ducked.  "This isn't in the air!"
+
+Came a straggling volley again, like a man running a metal hammer
+very rapidly along iron corrugations, and this time people were
+dropping all over the road.  One white-faced man not a score of
+yards away fell with a curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for
+some yards with blood running abundantly from his neck, and fell and
+never stirred again.  Another went down upon his back clumsily in
+the roadway and lay wringing his hands faster and faster until
+suddenly with a movement like a sigh they dropped inert by his side.
+A straw-hatted youth in a flannel suit ran and stopped and ran
+again.  He seemed to be holding something red and strange to his
+face with both hands; above them his eyes were round and anxious.
+Blood came out between his fingers.  He went right past the hotel
+and stumbled and suddenly sprawled headlong at the opposite corner.
+The majority of the crowd had already vanished into doorways and
+side streets.  But there was still shouting and there was still a
+remnant of amazed and angry men in the roadway--and one or two angry
+women.  They were not fighting.  Indeed they were unarmed, but if
+they had had weapons now they would certainly have used them.
+
+"But this is preposterous!" cried Benham.  "Preposterous.  Those
+soldiers are never going to shoot again! This must stop."
+
+He stood hesitating for a moment and then turned about and dashed
+for the staircase.  "Good Heaven!" cried White.  "What are you going
+to do?"
+
+Benham was going to stop that conflict very much as a man might go
+to stop a clock that is striking unwarrantably and amazingly.  He
+was going to stop it because it annoyed his sense of human dignity.
+
+White hesitated for a moment and then followed, crying "Benham!"
+
+But there was no arresting this last outbreak of Benham's all too
+impatient kingship.  He pushed aside a ducking German waiter who was
+peeping through the glass doors, and rushed out of the hotel.  With
+a gesture of authority he ran forward into the middle of the street,
+holding up his hand, in which he still held his dinner napkin
+clenched like a bomb.  White believes firmly that Benham thought he
+would be able to dominate everything.  He shouted out something
+about "Foolery!"
+
+Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sublime indifference
+to current things. . . .
+
+But the carbines spoke again.
+
+Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against something invisible.  He
+spun right round and fell down into a sitting position.  He sat
+looking surprised.
+
+After one moment of blank funk White drew out his pocket
+handkerchief, held it arm high by way of a white flag, and ran out
+from the piazza of the hotel.
+
+
+
+17
+
+
+"Are you hit?" cried White dropping to his knees and making himself
+as compact as possible.  "Benham!"
+
+Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought answered in a strange
+voice, a whisper into which a whistling note had been mixed.
+
+"It was stupid of me to come out here.  Not my quarrel.  Faults on
+both sides.  And now I can't get up.  I will sit here a moment and
+pull myself together.  Perhaps I'm--I must be shot.  But it seemed
+to come--inside me. . . .  If I should be hurt.  Am I hurt? . . .
+Will you see to that book of mine, White?  It's odd.  A kind of
+faintness. . . .  What?"
+
+"I will see after your book," said White and glanced at his hand
+because it felt wet, and was astonished to discover it bright red.
+He forgot about himself then, and the fresh flight of bullets down
+the street.
+
+The immediate effect of this blood was that he said something more
+about the book, a promise, a definite promise.  He could never
+recall his exact words, but their intention was binding.  He
+conveyed his absolute acquiescence with Benham's wishes whatever
+they were.  His life for that moment was unreservedly at his
+friend's disposal. . . .
+
+White never knew if his promise was heard.  Benham had stopped
+speaking quite abruptly with that "What?"
+
+He stared in front of him with a doubtful expression, like a man who
+is going to be sick, and then, in an instant, every muscle seemed to
+give way, he shuddered, his head flopped, and White held a dead man
+in his arms.
+
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Research Magnificent, by H. G. Wells
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