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.