Prothero meditated.
“THIS life,” he said at last, “this large expensiveness--...”
He left his criticism unfinished.
“I agree. It suits my mother somehow. I can't understand her living in
any other way. But--for me....”
“What can one do with several thousands a year?”
Prothero's interest in this question presently swamped his petty
personal resentments. “I suppose,” he said, “one might have rather a
lark with money like that. One would be free to go anywhere. To set all
sorts of things going.... It's clear you can't sell all you have and
give it to the poor. That is pauperization nowadays. You might run
a tremendously revolutionary paper. A real upsetting paper. How many
thousands is it?”
“I don't know. SOME.”
Prothero's interest was growing as he faced the possibilities.
“I've dreamt of a paper,” he said, “a paper that should tell the brute
truth about things.”
“I don't know that I'm particularly built to be a journalist,” Benham
objected.
“You're not,” said Billy.... “You might go into Parliament as a
perfectly independent member.... Only you wouldn't get in....”
“I'm not a speaker,” said Benham.
“Of course,” said Billy, “if you don't decide on a game, you'll just go
on like this. You'll fall into a groove, you'll--you'll hunt. You'll go
to Scotland for the grouse.”
For the moment Prothero had no further suggestions.
Benham waited for a second or so before he broached his own idea.
“Why, first of all, at any rate, Billy, shouldn't one use one's money
to make the best of oneself? To learn things that men without money and
leisure find it difficult to learn? By an accident, however unjust it
is, one is in the position of a leader and a privileged person. Why not
do one's best to give value as that?”
“Benham, that's the thin end of aristocracy!”
“Why not?”
“I hate aristocracy. For you it means doing what you like. While you are
energetic you will kick about and then you will come back to this.”
“That's one's own look-out,” said Benham, after reflection.
“No, it's bound to happen.”
Benham retreated a little from the immediate question.
“Well, we can't suddenly at a blow change the world. If it isn't to be
plutocracy to-day it has to be aristocracy.”
Prothero frowned over this, and then he made a sweeping proposition.
“YOU CANNOT HAVE ARISTOCRACY,” he said, “BECAUSE, YOU SEE--ALL MEN ARE
RIDICULOUS. Democracy has to fight its way out from under plutocracy.
There is nothing else to be done.”
“But a man in my position--?”
“It's a ridiculous position. You may try to escape being ridiculous. You
won't succeed.”
It seemed to Benham for a moment as though Prothero had got to the
bottom of the question, and then he perceived that he had only got to
the bottom of himself. Benham was pacing the floor.
He turned at the open window, held out a long forefinger, and uttered
his countervailing faith.
“Even if he is ridiculous, Prothero, a man may still be an aristocrat. A
man may anyhow be as much of an aristocrat as he can be.”
Prothero reflected. “No,” he said, “it sounds all right, but it's wrong.
I hate all these advantages and differences and distinctions. A man's a
man. What you say sounds well, but it's the beginning of pretension, of
pride--”
He stopped short.
“Better, pride than dishonour,” said Benham, “better the pretentious
life than the sordid life. What else is there?”
“A life isn't necessarily sordid because it isn't pretentious,” said
Prothero, his voice betraying a defensive disposition.
“But a life with a large income MUST be sordid unless it makes some sort
of attempt to be fine....”
9
By transitions that were as natural as they were complicated and
untraceable Prothero found his visit to Chexington developing into a
tangle of discussions that all ultimately resolved themselves into an
antagonism of the democratic and the aristocratic idea. And his part
was, he found, to be the exponent of the democratic idea. The next day
he came down early, his talk with Benham still running through his head,
and after a turn or so in the garden he was attracted to the front door
by a sound of voices, and found Lady Marayne had been up still earlier
and was dismounting from a large effective black horse. This extorted an
unwilling admiration from him. She greeted him very pleasantly and made
a kind of introduction of her steed. There had been trouble at a gate,
he was a young horse and fidgeted at gates; the dispute was still bright
in her. Benham she declared was still in bed. “Wait till I have a mount
for him.” She reappeared fitfully in the breakfast-room, and then he was
left to Benham until just before lunch. They read and afterwards, as the
summer day grew hot, they swam in the nude pond. She joined them in the
water, splashing about in a costume of some elaboration and being very
careful not to wet her hair. Then she came and sat with them on the
seat under the big cedar and talked with them in a wrap that was pretty
rather than prudish and entirely unmotherly. And she began a fresh
attack upon him by asking him if he wasn't a Socialist and whether he
didn't want to pull down Chexington and grow potatoes all over the park.
This struck Prothero as an inadequate statement of the Socialist project
and he made an unsuccessful attempt to get it amended.
The engagement thus opened was renewed with great energy at lunch.
Sir Godfrey had returned to London and the inmost aspect of his
fellow-creatures, but the party of three was supplemented by a vague
young lady from the village and an alert agent from the neighbouring
Tentington estate who had intentions about a cottage. Lady Marayne
insisted upon regarding Socialism as a proposal to reinaugurate the
first French Revolution, as an inversion of society so that it would be
bottom upward, as an attack upon rule, order, direction. “And what good
are all these proposals? If you had the poor dear king beheaded,
you'd only get a Napoleon. If you divided all the property up between
everybody, you'd have rich and poor again in a year.”
Billy perceived no way of explaining away this version of his Socialism
that would not involve uncivil contradictions--and nobody ever
contradicted Lady Marayne.
“But, Lady Marayne, don't you think there is a lot of disorder and
injustice in the world?” he protested.
“There would be ever so much more if your Socialists had their way.”
“But still, don't you think--...”
It is unnecessary even to recapitulate these universal controversies of
our time. The lunch-table and the dinner-table and the general talk of
the house drifted more and more definitely at its own level in the
same direction as the private talk of Prothero and Benham, towards
the antagonism of the privileged few and the many, of the trained
and traditioned against the natural and undisciplined, of aristocracy
against democracy. At the week-end Sir Godfrey returned to bring fresh
elements. He said that democracy was unscientific. “To deny aristocracy
is to deny the existence of the fittest. It is on the existence of the
fittest that progress depends.”
“But do our social conditions exalt the fittest?” asked Prothero.
“That is another question,” said Benham.
“Exactly,” said Sir Godfrey. “That is another question. But speaking
with some special knowledge, I should say that on the whole the people
who are on the top of things OUGHT to be on the top of things. I agree
with Aristotle that there is such a thing as a natural inferior.”
“So far as I can understand Mr. Prothero,” said Lady Marayne, “he thinks
that all the inferiors are the superiors and all the superiors inferior.
It's quite simple....”
It made Prothero none the less indignant with this, that there
was indeed a grain of truth in it. He hated superiors, he felt for
inferiors.
10
At last came the hour of tipping. An embarrassed and miserable Prothero
went slinking about the house distributing unexpected gold.
It was stupid, it was damnable; he had had to borrow the money from his
mother....
Lady Marayne felt he had escaped her. The controversy that should have
split these two young men apart had given them a new interest in each
other. When afterwards she sounded her son, very delicately, to see
if indeed he was aware of the clumsiness, the social ignorance and
uneasiness, the complete unsuitability of his friend, she could get no
more from him than that exasperating phrase, “He has ideas!”
What are ideas? England may yet be ruined by ideas.
He ought never to have gone to Trinity, that monster packet of
everything. He ought to have gone to some little GOOD college, good all
through. She ought to have asked some one who KNEW.
11
One glowing afternoon in October, as these two young men came over
Magdalen Bridge after a long disputatious and rather tiring walk to
Drayton--they had been talking of Eugenics and the “family”--Benham was
almost knocked down by an American trotter driven by Lord Breeze. “Whup
there!” said Lord Breeze in a voice deliberately brutal, and Benham,
roused from that abstraction which is partly fatigue, had to jump aside
and stumbled against the parapet as the gaunt pacer went pounding by.
Lord Breeze grinned the sort of grin a man remembers. And passed.
“Damnation!” said Benham with a face that had become suddenly very
white.
Then presently. “Any fool can do that who cares to go to the trouble.”
“That,” said Prothero, taking up their unquenchable issue, “that is the
feeling of democracy.”
“I walk because I choose to,” said Benham.
The thing rankled.
“This equestrianism,” he began, “is a matter of time and money--time
even more than money. I want to read. I want to deal with ideas....
“Any fool can drive....”
“Exactly,” said Prothero.
“As for riding, it means no more than the elaborate study and
cultivation of your horse. You have to know him. All horses are
individuals. A made horse perhaps goes its round like an omnibus, but
for the rest....”
Prothero made a noise of sympathetic assent.
“In a country where equestrianism is assertion I suppose one must be
equestrian....”
That night some malignant spirit kept Benham awake, and great
American trotters with vast wide-striding feet and long yellow teeth,
uncontrollable, hard-mouthed American trotters, pounded over his angry
soul.
“Prothero,” he said in hall next day, “we are going to drive to-morrow.”
Next day, so soon as they had lunched, he led the way towards Maltby's,
in Crosshampton Lane. Something in his bearing put a question into
Prothero's mind. “Benham,” he asked, “have you ever driven before?”
“NEVER,” said Benham.
“Well?”
“I'm going to now.”
Something between pleasure and alarm came into Prothero's eyes. He
quickened his pace so as to get alongside his friend and scrutinize his
pale determination. “Why are you doing this?” he asked.
“I want to do it.”
“Benham, is it--EQUESTRIAN?”
Benham made no audible reply. They proceeded resolutely in silence.
An air of expectation prevailed in Maltby's yard. In the shafts of a
high, bleak-looking vehicle with vast side wheels, a throne-like vehicle
that impressed Billy Prothero as being a gig, a very large angular black
horse was being harnessed.
“This is mine,” said Benham compactly.
“This is yours, sir,” said an ostler.
“He looks--QUIET.”
“You'll find him fresh enough, sir.”
Benham made a complicated ascent to the driver's seat and was handed the
reins. “Come on,” he said, and Prothero followed to a less exalted seat
at Benham's side. They seemed to be at a very great height indeed. The
horse was then led out into Crosshampton Lane, faced towards Trinity
Street and discharged. “Check,” said Benham, and touched the steed with
his whip. They started quite well, and the ostlers went back into the
yard, visibly unanxious. It struck Prothero that perhaps driving was
less difficult than he had supposed.
They went along Crosshampton Lane, that high-walled gulley, with
dignity, with only a slight suggestion of the inaccuracy that was
presently to become apparent, until they met a little old bearded don
on a bicycle. Then some misunderstanding arose between Benham and the
horse, and the little bearded don was driven into the narrow pavement
and had to get off hastily. He made no comment, but his face became like
a gargoyle. “Sorry,” said Benham, and gave his mind to the corner. There
was some difficulty about whether they were to turn to the right or the
left, but at last Benham, it seemed, carried his point, and they went
along the narrow street, past the grey splendours of King's, and rather
in the middle of the way.
Prothero considered the beast in front of him, and how proud and
disrespectful a horse in a dogcart can seem to those behind it!
Moreover, unaccustomed as he was to horses, he was struck by the strong
resemblance a bird's-eye view of a horse bears to a fiddle, a fiddle
with devil's ears.
“Of course,” said Prothero, “this isn't a trotter.”
“I couldn't get a trotter,” said Benham.
“I thought I would try this sort of thing before I tried a trotter,” he
added.
And then suddenly came disaster.
There was a butcher's cart on the right, and Benham, mistrusting the
intelligence of his steed, insisted upon an excessive amplitude of
clearance. He did not reckon with the hand-barrow on his left, piled
up with dirty plates from the lunch of Trinity Hall. It had been left
there; its custodian was away upon some mysterious errand. Heaven knows
why Trinity Hall exhibited the treasures of its crockery thus stained
and deified in the Cambridge streets. But it did--for Benham's and
Prothero's undoing. Prothero saw the great wheel over which he was
poised entangle itself with the little wheel of the barrow. “God!”
he whispered, and craned, fascinated. The little wheel was manifestly
intrigued beyond all self-control by the great wheel; it clung to it, it
went before it, heedless of the barrow, of which it was an inseparable
part. The barrow came about with an appearance of unwillingness, it
locked against the great wheel; it reared itself towards Prothero and
began, smash, smash, smash, to shed its higher plates. It was clear
that Benham was grappling with a crisis upon a basis of inadequate
experience. A number of people shouted haphazard things. Then, too late,
the barrow had persuaded the little wheel to give up its fancy for the
great wheel, and there was an enormous crash.
“Whoa!” cried Benham. “Whoa!” but also, unfortunately, he sawed hard at
the horse's mouth.
The animal, being in some perplexity, danced a little in the narrow
street, and then it had come about and it was backing, backing, on
the narrow pavement and towards the plate-glass window of a book and
newspaper shop. Benham tugged at its mouth much harder than ever.
Prothero saw the window bending under the pressure of the wheel. A sense
of the profound seriousness of life and of the folly of this expedition
came upon him. With extreme nimbleness he got down just as the window
burst. It went with an explosion like a pistol shot, and then a clatter
of falling glass. People sprang, it seemed, from nowhere, and jostled
about Prothero, so that he became a peripheral figure in the discussion.
He perceived that a man in a green apron was holding the horse, and that
various people were engaged in simultaneous conversation with Benham,
who with a pale serenity of face and an awful calm of manner, dealt with
each of them in turn.
“I'm sorry,” he was saying. “Somebody ought to have been in charge of
the barrow. Here are my cards. I am ready to pay for any damage....
“The barrow ought not to have been there....
“Yes, I am going on. Of course I'm going on. Thank you.”
He beckoned to the man who had held the horse and handed him
half-a-crown. He glanced at Prothero as one might glance at a stranger.
“Check!” he said. The horse went on gravely. Benham lifted out his whip.
He appeared to have clean forgotten Prothero. Perhaps presently he would
miss him. He went on past Trinity, past the ruddy brick of St. John's.
The curve of the street hid him from Prothero's eyes.
Prothero started in pursuit. He glimpsed the dog-cart turning into
Bridge Street. He had an impression that Benham used the whip at the
corner, and that the dog-cart went forward out of sight with a startled
jerk. Prothero quickened his pace.
But when he got to the fork between the Huntingdon Road and the
Cottenham Road, both roads were clear.
He spent some time in hesitation. Then he went along the Huntingdon Road
until he came upon a road-mender, and learnt that Benham had passed that
way. “Going pretty fast 'e was,” said the road-mender, “and whipping 'is
'orse. Else you might 'a thought 'e was a boltin' with 'im.” Prothero
decided that if Benham came back at all he would return by way of
Cottenham, and it was on the Cottenham Road that at last he encountered
his friend again.
Benham was coming along at that good pace which all experienced horses
when they are fairly turned back towards Cambridge display. And there
was something odd about Benham, as though he had a large circular
halo with a thick rim. This, it seemed, had replaced his hat. He was
certainly hatless. The warm light of the sinking sun shone upon the
horse and upon Benham's erect figure and upon his face, and gleams of
fire kept flashing from his head to this rim, like the gleam of drawn
swords seen from afar. As he drew nearer this halo detached itself from
him and became a wheel sticking up behind him. A large, clumsy-looking
bicycle was attached to the dog-cart behind. The expression of Benham's
golden face was still a stony expression; he regarded his friend with
hard eyes.
“You all right, Benham?” cried Prothero, advancing into the road.
His eye examined the horse. It looked all right, if anything it was a
trifle subdued; there was a little foam about its mouth, but not very
much.
“Whoa!” said Benham, and the horse stopped. “Are you coming up,
Prothero?”
Prothero clambered up beside him. “I was anxious,” he said.
“There was no need to be.”
“You've broken your whip.”
“Yes. It broke.... GET up!”
They proceeded on their way to Cambridge.
“Something has happened to the wheel,” said Prothero, trying to be at
his ease.
“Merely a splinter or so. And a spoke perhaps.”
“And what is this behind?”
Benham made a half-turn of the head. “It's a motor-bicycle.”
Prothero took in details.
“Some of it is missing.”
“No, the front wheel is under the seat.”
“Oh!”
“Did you find it?” Prothero asked, after an interval.
“You mean?”
“He ran into a motor-car--as I was passing. I was perhaps a little to
blame. He asked me to bring his machine to Cambridge. He went on in the
car.... It is all perfectly simple.”
Prothero glanced at the splinters in the wheel with a renewed interest.
“Did your wheel get into it?” he asked. Benham affected not to hear. He
was evidently in no mood for story-telling.
“Why did you get down, Prothero?” he asked abruptly, with the note of
suppressed anger thickening his voice.
Prothero became vividly red. “I don't know,” he said, after an interval.
“I DO,” said Benham, and they went on in a rich and active silence to
Cambridge, and the bicycle repair shop in Bridge Street, and Trinity
College. At the gate of Trinity Benham stopped, and conveyed rather by
acts than words that Prothero was to descend. He got down meekly enough,
although he felt that the return to Maltby's yard might have many points
of interest. But the spirit had gone out of him.
12
For three days the two friends avoided each other, and then Prothero
went to Benham's room. Benham was smoking cigarettes--Lady Marayne, in
the first warmth of his filial devotion, had prohibited his pipe--and
reading Webb's INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY. “Hello!” he said coldly, scarcely
looking up, and continued to read that absorbing work.
“I keep on thinking how I jumped down from that damned dog-cart,” said
Prothero, without any preface.
“It didn't matter in the least,” said Benham distantly.
“Oh! ROT,” said Prothero. “I behaved like a coward.”
Benham shut his book.
“Benham,” said Prothero. “You are right about aristocracy, and I am
wrong. I've been thinking about it night and day.”
Benham betrayed no emotion. But his tone changed. “Billy,” he said,
“there are cigarettes and whiskey in the corner. Don't make a fuss about
a trifle.”
“No whiskey,” said Billy, and lit a cigarette. “And it isn't a trifle.”
He came to Benham's hearthrug. “That business,” he said, “has changed
all my views. No--don't say something polite! I see that if one hasn't
the habit of pride one is bound to get off a dogcart when it seems
likely to smash. You have the habit of pride, and I haven't. So far as
the habit of pride goes, I come over to the theory of aristocracy.”
Benham said nothing, but he put down Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and
reached out for and got and lit a cigarette.
“I give up 'Go as you please.' I give up the natural man. I admit
training. I perceive I am lax and flabby, unguarded, I funk too much, I
eat too much, and I drink too much. And, yet, what I have always liked
in you, Benham, is just this--that you don't.”
“I do,” said Benham.
“Do what?”
“Funk.”
“Benham, I believe that naturally you funk as much as I do. You're more
a thing of nerves than I am, far more. But you keep yourself up to
the mark, and I have let myself get flabby. You're so right. You're
so utterly right. These last nights I've confessed it--aloud. I had
an inkling of it--after that rag. But now it's as clear as daylight.
I don't know if you mean to go on with me, after what's happened, but
anyhow I want you to know, whether you end our friendship or not--”
“Billy, don't be an old ass,” said Benham.
Both young men paused for a moment. They made no demonstrations. But the
strain was at an end between them.
“I've thought it all out,” Billy went on with a sudden buoyancy. “We
two are both of the same kind of men. Only you see, Benham, you have
a natural pride and I haven't. You have pride. But we are both
intellectuals. We both belong to what the Russians call the
Intelligentsia. We have ideas, we have imagination, that is our
strength. And that is our weakness. That makes us moral light-weights.
We are flimsy and uncertain people. All intellectuals are flimsy and
uncertain people. It's not only that they are critical and fastidious;
they are weak-handed. They look about them; their attention wanders.
Unless they have got a habit of controlling themselves and forcing
themselves and holding themselves together.”
“The habit of pride.”
“Yes. And then--then we are lords of the world.”
“All this, Billy,” said Benham, “I steadfastly believe.”
“I've seen it all now,” said Prothero. “Lord! how clearly I see it!
The intellectual is either a prince or he is a Greek slave in a Roman
household. He's got to hold his chin up or else he becomes--even as
these dons we see about us--a thing that talks appointments, a toady, a
port-wine bibber, a mass of detail, a conscious maker of neat sayings,
a growing belly under a dwindling brain. Their gladness is drink or
gratified vanity or gratified malice, their sorrow is indigestion
or--old maid's melancholy. They are the lords of the world who will not
take the sceptre.... And what I want to say to you, Benham, more than
anything else is, YOU go on--YOU make yourself equestrian. You drive
your horse against Breeze's, and go through the fire and swim in the
ice-cold water and climb the precipice and drink little and sleep hard.
And--I wish I could do so too.”
“But why not?”