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....