going to do afterwards. Do you know you are going to be quite well off?”
Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. “My father said something.
He was rather vague. It wasn't his affair--that kind of thing.”
“You will be quite well off,” she repeated, without any complicating
particulars. “You will be so well off that it will be possible for you
to do anything almost that you like in the world. Nothing will tie you.
Nothing....”
“But--HOW well off?”
“You will have several thousands a year.”
“Thousands?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“But--Mother, this is rather astounding.... Does this mean there are
estates somewhere, responsibilities?”
“It is just money. Investments.”
“You know, I've imagined--. I've thought always I should have to DO
something.”
“You MUST do something, Poff. But it needn't be for a living. The world
is yours without that. And so you see you've got to make plans. You've
got to know the sort of people who'll have things in their hands. You've
got to keep out of--holes and corners. You've got to think of Parliament
and abroad. There's the army, there's diplomacy. There's the Empire. You
can be a Cecil Rhodes if you like. You can be a Winston....”
5
Perhaps it was only the innate eagerness of Lady Marayne which made
her feel disappointed in her son's outlook upon life. He did not choose
among his glittering possibilities, he did not say what he was going to
be, proconsul, ambassador, statesman, for days. And he talked VAGUELY of
wanting to do something fine, but all in a fog. A boy of nearly nineteen
ought to have at least the beginnings of SAVOIR FAIRE.
Was he in the right set? Was he indeed in the right college? Trinity,
by his account, seemed a huge featureless place--and might he not
conceivably be LOST in it? In those big crowds one had to insist upon
oneself. Poff never insisted upon himself--except quite at the wrong
moment. And there was this Billy Prothero. BILLY! Like a goat or
something. People called William don't get their Christian name insisted
upon unless they are vulnerable somewhere. Any form of William stamps
a weakness, Willie, Willy, Will, Billy, Bill; it's a fearful handle for
one's friends. At any rate Poff had escaped that. But this Prothero!
“But who IS this Billy Prothero?” she asked one evening in the walled
garden.
“He was at Minchinghampton.”
“But who IS he? Who is his father? Where does he come from?”
Benham sought in his mind for a space. “I don't know,” he said at last.
Billy had always been rather reticent about his people. She demanded
descriptions. She demanded an account of Billy's furniture, Billy's
clothes, Billy's form of exercise. It dawned upon Benham that for some
inexplicable reason she was hostile to Billy. It was like the unmasking
of an ambuscade. He had talked a lot about Prothero's ideas and the
discussions of social reform and social service that went on in his
rooms, for Billy read at unknown times, and was open at all hours to any
argumentative caller. To Lady Marayne all ideas were obnoxious, a form
of fogging; all ideas, she held, were queer ideas. “And does he call
himself a Socialist?” she asked. “I THOUGHT he would.”
“Poff,” she cried suddenly, “you're not a SOCIALIST?”
“Such a vague term.”
“But these friends of yours--they seem to be ALL Socialists. Red ties
and everything complete.”
“They have ideas,” he evaded. He tried to express it better. “They give
one something to take hold of.”
She sat up stiffly on the garden-seat. She lifted her finger at him,
very seriously. “I hope,” she said with all her heart, “that you will
have nothing to do with such ideas. Nothing. SOCIALISM!”
“They make a case.”
“Pooh! Any one can make a case.”
“But--”
“There's no sense in them. What is the good of talking about upsetting
everything? Just disorder. How can one do anything then? You mustn't.
You mustn't. No. It's nonsense, little Poff. It's absurd. And you may
spoil so much.... I HATE the way you talk of it.... As if it wasn't
all--absolutely--RUBBISH....”
She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears.
Why couldn't her son go straight for his ends, clear tangible ends,
as she had always done? This thinking about everything! She had never
thought about anything in all her life for more than half an hour--and
it had always turned out remarkably well.
Benham felt baffled. There was a pause. How on earth could he go on
telling her his ideas if this was how they were to be taken?
“I wish sometimes,” his mother said abruptly, with an unusually sharp
note in her voice, “that you wouldn't look quite so like your father.”
“But I'm NOT like my father!” said Benham puzzled.
“No,” she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer reason,
“so why should you go LOOKING like him? That CONCERNED expression....”
She jumped to her feet. “Poff,” she said, “I want to go and see the
evening primroses pop. You and I are talking nonsense. THEY don't have
ideas anyhow. They just pop--as God meant them to do. What stupid things
we human beings are!”
Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most baffling of all.
6
Billy Prothero became the symbol in the mind of Lady Marayne for all
that disappointed her in Benham. He had to become the symbol, because
she could not think of complicated or abstract things, she had to make
things personal, and he was the only personality available. She fretted
over his existence for some days therefore (once she awakened and
thought about him in the night), and then suddenly she determined to
grasp her nettle. She decided to seize and obliterate this Prothero.
He must come to Chexington and be thoroughly and conclusively led on,
examined, ransacked, shown up, and disposed of for ever. At once. She
was not quite clear how she meant to do this, but she was quite resolved
that it had to be done. Anything is better than inaction.
There was a little difficulty about dates and engagements, but he came,
and through the season of expectation Benham, who was now for the first
time in contact with the feminine nature, was delighted at the apparent
change to cordiality. So that he talked of Billy to his mother much more
than he had ever done before.
Billy had been his particular friend at Minchinghampton, at least
during the closing two years of his school life. Billy had fallen into
friendship with Benham, as some of us fall in love, quite suddenly, when
he saw Benham get down from the fence and be sick after his encounter
with the bull. Already Billy was excited by admiration, but it was the
incongruity of the sickness conquered him. He went back to the school
with his hands more than usually in his pockets, and no eyes for
anything but this remarkable strung-up fellow-creature. He felt he had
never observed Benham before, and he was astonished that he had not done
so.
Billy Prothero was a sturdy sort of boy, generously wanting in good
looks. His hair was rough, and his complexion muddy, and he walked
about with his hands in his pockets, long flexible lips protruded in
a whistle, and a rather shapeless nose well up to show he didn't care.
Providence had sought to console him by giving him a keen eye for the
absurdity of other people. He had a suggestive tongue, and he professed
and practised cowardice to the scandal of all his acquaintances. He was
said never to wash behind his ears, but this report wronged him. There
had been a time when he did not do so, but his mother had won him to a
promise, and now that operation was often the sum of his simple hasty
toilet. His desire to associate himself with Benham was so strong
that it triumphed over a defensive reserve. It enabled him to detect
accessible moments, do inobtrusive friendly services, and above all
amuse his quarry. He not only amused Benham, he stimulated him. They
came to do quite a number of things together. In the language of
schoolboy stories they became “inseparables.”
Prothero's first desire, so soon as they were on a footing that enabled
him to formulate desires, was to know exactly what Benham thought he was
up to in crossing a field with a bull in it instead of going round, and
by the time he began to understand that, he had conceived an affection
for him that was to last a lifetime.
“I wasn't going to be bullied by a beast,” said Benham.
“Suppose it had been an elephant?” Prothero cried.... “A mad
elephant?... A pack of wolves?”
Benham was too honest not to see that he was entangled. “Well,
suppose in YOUR case it had been a wild cat?... A fierce mastiff?... A
mastiff?... A terrier?... A lap dog?”
“Yes, but my case is that there are limits.”
Benham was impatient at the idea of limits. With a faintly malicious
pleasure Prothero lugged him back to that idea.
“We both admit there are limits,” Prothero concluded. “But between the
absolutely impossible and the altogether possible there's the region
of risk. You think a man ought to take that risk--” He reflected. “I
think--no--I think NOT.”
“If he feels afraid,” cried Benham, seeing his one point. “If he feels
afraid. Then he ought to take it....”
After a digestive interval, Prothero asked, “WHY? Why should he?”
The discussion of that momentous question, that Why? which Benham
perhaps might never have dared ask himself, and which Prothero perhaps
might never have attempted to answer if it had not been for the clash of
their minds, was the chief topic of their conversation for many months.
From Why be brave? it spread readily enough to Why be honest? Why be
clean?--all the great whys of life.... Because one believes.... But why
believe it? Left to himself Benham would have felt the mere asking of
this question was a thing ignoble, not to be tolerated. It was, as it
were, treason to nobility. But Prothero put it one afternoon in a way
that permitted no high dismissal of their doubts. “You can't build your
honour on fudge, Benham. Like committing sacrilege--in order to buy a
cloth for the altar.”
By that Benham was slipped from the recognized code and launched upon
speculations which became the magnificent research.
It was not only in complexion and stature and ways of thinking that
Billy and Benham contrasted. Benham inclined a little to eloquence, he
liked very clean hands, he had a dread of ridiculous outlines. Prothero
lapsed readily into ostentatious slovenliness, when his hands were dirty
he pitied them sooner than scrubbed them, he would have worn an overcoat
with one tail torn off rather than have gone cold. Moreover, Prothero
had an earthy liking for animals, he could stroke and tickle strange
cats until they wanted to leave father and mother and all earthly
possessions and follow after him, and he mortgaged a term's pocket money
and bought and kept a small terrier in the school house against all law
and tradition, under the baseless pretence that it was a stray animal
of unknown origin. Benham, on the other hand, was shy with small animals
and faintly hostile to big ones. Beasts he thought were just beasts.
And Prothero had a gift for caricature, while Benham's aptitude was for
music.
It was Prothero's eyes and pencil that first directed Benham to the
poor indolences and evasions and insincerities of the masters. It was
Prothero's wicked pictures that made him see the shrivelled absurdity
of the vulgar theology. But it was Benham who stood between Prothero
and that rather coarsely conceived epicureanism that seemed his logical
destiny. When quite early in their Cambridge days Prothero's
revolt against foppery reached a nadir of personal neglect, and two
philanthropists from the rooms below him, goaded beyond the normal
tolerance of Trinity, and assisted by two sportsmen from Trinity Hall,
burnt his misshapen straw hat (after partly filling it with gunpowder
and iron filings) and sought to duck him in the fountain in the court,
it was Benham, in a state between distress and madness, and armed with
a horn-handled cane of exceptional size, who intervened, turned the
business into a blend of wrangle and scuffle, introduced the degrading
topic of duelling into a simple wholesome rag of four against one,
carried him off under the cloud of horror created by this impropriety
and so saved him, still only slightly wetted, not only from this
indignity but from the experiment in rationalism that had provoked it.
Because Benham made it perfectly clear what he had thought and felt
about this hat.
Such was the illuminating young man whom Lady Marayne decided to invite
to Chexington, into the neighbourhood of herself, Sir Godfrey, and her
circle of friends.
7
He was quite anxious to satisfy the requirements of Benham's people and
to do his friend credit. He was still in the phase of being a penitent
pig, and he inquired carefully into the needs and duties of a summer
guest in a country house. He knew it was quite a considerable country
house, and that Sir Godfrey wasn't Benham's father, but like most
people, he was persuaded that Lady Marayne had divorced the parental
Benham. He arrived dressed very neatly in a brown suit that had only one
fault, it had not the remotest suggestion of having been made for him.
It fitted his body fairly well, it did annex his body with only a few
slight incompatibilities, but it repudiated his hands and face. He had
a conspicuously old Gladstone bag and a conspicuously new despatch case,
and he had forgotten black ties and dress socks and a hair brush. He
arrived in the late afternoon, was met by Benham, in tennis flannels,
looking smartened up and a little unfamiliar, and taken off in a
spirited dog-cart driven by a typical groom. He met his host and hostess
at dinner.
Sir Godfrey was a rationalist and a residuum. Very much of him, too much
perhaps, had gone into the acquirement and perfect performance of the
caecal operation; the man one met in the social world was what was
left over. It had the effect of being quiet, but in its unobtrusive way
knobby. He had a knobby brow, with an air about it of having recently
been intent, and his conversation was curiously spotted with little
knobby arrested anecdotes. If any one of any distinction was named, he
would reflect and say, “Of course,--ah, yes, I know him, I know him.
Yes, I did him a little service--in '96.”
And something in his manner would suggest a satisfaction, or a
dissatisfaction with confidential mysteries.
He welcomed Billy Prothero in a colourless manner, and made conversation
about Cambridge. He had known one or two of the higher dons. One he had
done at Cambridge quite recently. “The inns are better than they are at
Oxford, which is not saying very much, but the place struck me as being
changed. The men seemed younger....”
The burden of the conversation fell upon Lady Marayne. She looked
extraordinarily like a flower to Billy, a little diamond buckle on a
black velvet band glittered between the two masses of butter-coloured
hair that flowed back from her forehead, her head was poised on the
prettiest neck conceivable, and her shapely little shoulders and her
shapely little arms came decidedly but pleasantly out of a softness and
sparkle of white and silver and old rose. She talked what sounded like
innocent commonplaces a little spiced by whim, though indeed each remark
had an exploratory quality, and her soft blue eyes rested ever and again
upon Billy's white tie. It seemed she did so by the merest inadvertency,
but it made the young man wish he had after all borrowed a black one
from Benham. But the manservant who had put his things out had put it
out, and he hadn't been quite sure. Also she noted all the little things
he did with fork and spoon and glass. She gave him an unusual sense of
being brightly, accurately and completely visible.
Chexington, it seemed to Billy, was done with a large and costly and
easy completeness. The table with its silver and flowers was much more
beautifully done than any table he had sat at before, and in the dimness
beyond the brightness there were two men to wait on the four of them.
The old grey butler was really wonderfully good....
“You shoot, Mr. Prothero?”
“You hunt, Mr. Prothero?”
“You know Scotland well, Mr. Prothero?”
These questions disturbed Prothero. He did not shoot, he did not hunt,
he did not go to Scotland for the grouse, he did not belong, and Lady
Marayne ought to have seen that he did not belong to the class that does
these things.
“You ride much, Mr. Prothero?”
Billy conceived a suspicion that these innocent inquiries were designed
to emphasize a contrast in his social quality. But he could not be sure.
One never could be sure with Lady Marayne. It might be just that she
did not understand the sort of man he was. And in that case ought he
to maintain the smooth social surface unbroken by pretending as far as
possible to be this kind of person, or ought he to make a sudden gap in
it by telling his realities. He evaded the shooting question anyhow. He
left it open for Lady Marayne and the venerable butler and Sir Godfrey
and every one to suppose he just happened to be the sort of gentleman
of leisure who doesn't shoot. He disavowed hunting, he made it appear he
travelled when he travelled in directions other than Scotland. But the
fourth question brought him to bay. He regarded his questioner with his
small rufous eye.
“I have never been across a horse in my life, Lady Marayne.”
“Tut, tut,” said Sir Godfrey. “Why!--it's the best of exercise.
Every man ought to ride. Good for the health. Keeps him fit. Prevents
lodgments. Most trouble due to lodgments.”
“I've never had a chance of riding. And I think I'm afraid of horses.”
“That's only an excuse,” said Lady Marayne. “Everybody's afraid of
horses and nobody's really afraid of horses.”
“But I'm not used to horses. You see--I live on my mother. And she can't
afford to keep a stable.”
His hostess did not see his expression of discomfort. Her pretty eyes
were intent upon the peas with which she was being served.
“Does your mother live in the country?” she asked, and took her peas
with fastidious exactness.
Prothero coloured brightly. “She lives in London.”
“All the year?”
“All the year.”
“But isn't it dreadfully hot in town in the summer?”
Prothero had an uncomfortable sense of being very red in the face. This
kept him red. “We're suburban people,” he said.
“But I thought--isn't there the seaside?”
“My mother has a business,” said Prothero, redder than ever.
“O-oh!” said Lady Marayne. “What fun that must be for her?”
“It's a real business, and she has to live by it. Sometimes it's a
worry.”
“But a business of her own!” She surveyed the confusion of his visage
with a sweet intelligence. “Is it an amusing sort of business, Mr.
Prothero?”
Prothero looked mulish. “My mother is a dressmaker,” he said. “In
Brixton. She doesn't do particularly badly--or well. I live on my
scholarship. I have lived on scholarships since I was thirteen. And you
see, Lady Marayne, Brixton is a poor hunting country.”
Lady Marayne felt she had unmasked Prothero almost indecently. Whatever
happened there must be no pause. There must be no sign of a hitch.
“But it's good at tennis,” she said. “You DO play tennis, Mr. Prothero?”
“I--I gesticulate,” said Prothero.
Lady Marayne, still in flight from that pause, went off at a tangent.
“Poff, my dear,” she said, “I've had a diving-board put at the deep end
of the pond.”
The remark hung unanswered for a moment. The transition had been too
quick for Benham's state of mind.
“Do you swim, Mr. Prothero?” the lady asked, though a moment before she
had determined that she would never ask him a question again. But this
time it was a lucky question.
“Prothero mopped up the lot of us at Minchinghampton with his diving and
swimming,” Benham explained, and the tension was relaxed.
Lady Marayne spoke of her own swimming, and became daring and amusing at
her difficulties with local feeling when first she swam in the pond.
The high road ran along the far side of the pond--“And it didn't wear a
hedge or anything,” said Lady Marayne. “That was what they didn't quite
like. Swimming in an undraped pond....”
Prothero had been examined enough. Now he must be entertained. She told
stories about the village people in her brightest manner. The third
story she regretted as soon as she was fairly launched upon it; it
was how she had interviewed the village dressmaker, when Sir Godfrey
insisted upon her supporting local industries. It was very amusing but
technical. The devil had put it into her head. She had to go through
with it. She infused an extreme innocence into her eyes and fixed them
on Prothero, although she felt a certain deepening pinkness in her
cheeks was betraying her, and she did not look at Benham until her
unhappy, but otherwise quite amusing anecdote, was dead and gone and
safely buried under another....
But people ought not to go about having dressmakers for mothers....
And coming into other people's houses and influencing their sons....
8
That night when everything was over Billy sat at the writing-table of
his sumptuous bedroom--the bed was gilt wood, the curtains of the three
great windows were tremendous, and there was a cheval glass that showed
the full length of him and seemed to look over his head for more,--and
meditated upon this visit of his. It was more than he had been prepared
for. It was going to be a great strain. The sleek young manservant in
an alpaca jacket, who said “Sir” whenever you looked at him, and who had
seized upon and unpacked Billy's most private Gladstone bag without even
asking if he might do so, and put away and displayed Billy's things in
a way that struck Billy as faintly ironical, was unexpected. And it was
unexpected that the brown suit, with its pockets stuffed with Billy's
personal and confidential sundries, had vanished. And apparently a
bath in a bathroom far down the corridor was prescribed for him in
the morning; he hadn't thought of a dressing-gown. And after one had
dressed, what did one do? Did one go down and wander about the house
looking for the breakfast-room or wait for a gong? Would Sir Godfrey
read Family Prayers? And afterwards did one go out or hang about to be
entertained? He knew now quite clearly that those wicked blue eyes would
mark his every slip. She did not like him. She did not like him, he
supposed, because he was common stuff. He didn't play up to her world
and her. He was a discord in this rich, cleverly elaborate household.
You could see it in the servants' attitudes. And he was committed to a
week of this.
Billy puffed out his cheeks to blow a sigh, and then decided to be angry
and say “Damn!”
This way of living which made him uncomfortable was clearly an
irrational and objectionable way of living. It was, in a cumbersome way,
luxurious. But the waste of life of it, the servants, the observances,
all concentrated on the mere detail of existence? There came a rap at
the door. Benham appeared, wearing an expensive-looking dressing-jacket
which Lady Marayne had bought for him. He asked if he might talk for
a bit and smoke. He sat down in a capacious chintz-covered easy chair
beside Prothero, lit a cigarette, and came to the point after only a
trivial hesitation.
“Prothero,” he said, “you know what my father is.”
“I thought he ran a preparatory school.”
There was the profoundest resentment in Prothero's voice.
“And, all the same, I'm going to be a rich man.”
“I don't understand,” said Prothero, without any shadow of
congratulation.
Benham told Prothero as much as his mother had conveyed to him of the
resources of his wealth. Her version had been adapted to his tender
years and the delicacies of her position. The departed Nolan had become
an eccentric godfather. Benham's manner was apologetic, and he made
it clear that only recently had these facts come to him. He had never
suspected that he had had this eccentric godfather. It altered the
outlook tremendously. It was one of the reasons that made Benham glad to
have Prothero there, one wanted a man of one's own age, who understood
things a little, to try over one's new ideas. Prothero listened with an
unamiable expression.
“What would you do, Prothero, if you found yourself saddled with some
thousands a year?”
“Godfathers don't grow in Brixton,” said Prothero concisely.
“Well, what am I to do, Prothero?”
“Does all THIS belong to you?”
“No, this is my mother's.”
“Godfather too?”