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.