as he was engaged in meticulously putting out Benham's clothes--was
“leaving its ancestral shelters and going out upon the greatest
adventure that ever was in space or time.” If he had been told as much
by Benham he would probably have said, “Indeed, sir,” and proceeded
accurately with his duties. And if Benham's voice had seemed to call for
any additional remark, he would probably have added, “It's 'igh time,
sir, something of the sort was done. Will you have the white wesket as
before, sir, or a fresh one this evening?... Unless it's a very special
occasion, sir.... Exactly, sir. THANK you, sir.”
And when her son was properly installed in his apartments Lady Marayne
came round one morning with a large experienced-looking portfolio and
rendered an account of her stewardship of his estate that was already
some months overdue. It was all very confused and confusing, and there
were inexplicable incidents, a heavy overdraft at the bank for example,
but this was Sir Godfrey's fault, she explained. “He never would help
me with any of this business,” she said. “I've had to add sometimes for
HOURS. But, of course, you are a man, and when you've looked through it
all, I know you'll understand.”
He did look through it enough to see that it was undesirable that he
should understand too explicitly, and, anyhow, he was manifestly
very well off indeed, and the circumstances of the case, even as
he understood them, would have made any businesslike book-keeping
ungracious. The bankers submitted the corroborating account of
securities, and he found himself possessed of his unconditional six
thousand a year, with, as she put it, “the world at his feet.” On the
whole it seemed more wonderful to him now than when he had first heard
of it. He kissed her and thanked her, and left the portfolio open for
Merkle's entirely honest and respectful but very exact inspection, and
walked back with her to Desborough Street, and all the while he was
craving to ask the one tremendous question he knew he would never ask,
which was just how exactly this beneficent Nolan came in....
Once or twice in the small hours, and on a number of other occasions,
this unspeakable riddle assumed a portentous predominance in his mind.
He was forced back upon his inner consciousness for its consideration.
He could discuss it with nobody else, because that would have been
discussing his mother.
Probably most young men who find themselves with riches at large in the
world have some such perplexity as this mixed in with the gift. Such men
as the Cecils perhaps not, because they are in the order of things, the
rich young Jews perhaps not, because acquisition is their principle,
but for most other intelligent inheritors there must be this twinge of
conscientious doubt. “Why particularly am I picked out for so tremendous
an advantage?” If the riddle is not Nolan, then it is rent, or it is the
social mischief of the business, or the particular speculative COUP that
established their fortune.
“PECUNIA NON OLET,” Benham wrote, “and it is just as well. Or the
west-ends of the world would reek with deodorizers. Restitution is
inconceivable; how and to whom? And in the meanwhile here we are lifted
up by our advantage to a fantastic appearance of opportunity. Whether
the world looks to us or not to do tremendous things, it ought to look
to us. And above all we ought to look to ourselves. RICHESSE OBLIGE.”
3
It is not to be supposed that Benham came to town only with a general
theory of aristocracy. He had made plans for a career. Indeed, he had
plans for several careers. None of them when brought into contrast with
the great spectacle of London retained all the attractiveness that had
saturated them at their inception.
They were all more or less political careers. Whatever a democratic man
may be, Prothero and he had decided that an aristocratic man is a public
man. He is made and protected in what he is by laws and the state and
his honour goes out to the state. The aristocrat has no right to be
a voluptuary or a mere artist or a respectable nonentity, or any such
purely personal things. Responsibility for the aim and ordering of the
world is demanded from him as imperatively as courage.
Benham's deliberate assumption of the equestrian role brought him
into contact with a new set of acquaintances, conscious of political
destinies. They were amiable, hard young men, almost affectedly
unaffected; they breakfasted before dawn to get in a day's hunting, and
they saw to it that Benham's manifest determination not to discredit
himself did not lead to his breaking his neck. Their bodies were
beautifully tempered, and their minds were as flabby as Prothero's body.
Among them were such men as Lord Breeze and Peter Westerton, and that
current set of Corinthians who supposed themselves to be resuscitating
the Young England movement and Tory Democracy. Poor movements which
indeed have never so much lived as suffered chronic resuscitation. These
were days when Tariff Reform was only an inglorious possibility for the
Tory Party, and Young England had yet to demonstrate its mental quality
in an anti-socialist campaign. Seen from the perspectives of Cambridge
and Chexington, the Tory party was still a credible basis for the
adventure of a young man with an aristocratic theory in his mind.
These were the days when the strain and extremity of a dangerous
colonial war were fresh in people's minds, when the quality of
the public consciousness was braced up by its recent response to
unanticipated demands. The conflict of stupidities that had caused
the war was overlaid and forgotten by a hundred thousand devotions,
by countless heroic deaths and sufferings, by a pacification largely
conceived and broadly handled. The nation had displayed a belated regard
for its honour and a sustained passion for great unities. It was still
possible for Benham to regard the empire as a splendid opportunity,
and London as the conceivable heart of the world. He could think of
Parliament as a career, and of a mingling of aristocratic socialism
based on universal service with a civilizing imperialism as a
purpose....
But his thoughts had gone wider and deeper than that....
Already when Benham came to London he had begun to dream of
possibilities that went beyond the accidental states and empires of
to-day. Prothero's mind, replete with historical detail, could find
nothing but absurdity in the alliances and dynasties and loyalties of
our time. “Patched up things, Benham, temporary, pretentious. All very
well for the undignified man, the democratic man, to take shelter under,
all very well for the humourist to grin and bear, all very well for the
crowd and the quack, but not for the aristocrat--No!--his mind cuts like
steel and burns like fire. Lousy sheds they are, plastered hoardings...
and such a damned nuisance too! For any one who wants to do honourable
things! With their wars and their diplomacies, their tariffs and
their encroachments; all their humbugging struggles, their bloody and
monstrous struggles, that finally work out to no end at all.... If you
are going for the handsome thing in life then the world has to be a
united world, Benham, as a matter of course. That was settled when
the railways and the telegraph came. Telephones, wireless telegraphy,
aeroplanes insist on it. We've got to mediatise all this stuff, all
these little crowns and boundaries and creeds, and so on, that stand
in the way. Just as Italy had to be united in spite of all the rotten
little dukes and princes and republics, just as Germany had to be united
in spite of its scores of kingdoms and duchies and liberties, so now
the world. Things as they are may be fun for lawyers and politicians
and court people and--douaniers; they may suit the loan-mongers and
the armaments shareholders, they may even be more comfortable for the
middle-aged, but what, except as an inconvenience, does that matter to
you or me?”
Prothero always pleased Benham when he swept away empires. There was
always a point when the rhetoric broke into gesture.
“We've got to sweep them away, Benham,” he said, with a wide gesture of
his arm. “We've got to sweep them all away.”
Prothero helped himself to some more whiskey, and spoke hastily,
because he was afraid some one else might begin. He was never safe from
interruption in his own room. The other young men present sucked at
their pipes and regarded him doubtfully. They were never quite certain
whether Prothero was a prophet or a fool. They could not understand a
mixed type, and he was so manifestly both.
“The only sane political work for an intelligent man is to get the
world-state ready. For that we have to prepare an aristocracy--”
“Your world-state will be aristocratic?” some one interpolated.
“Of course it will be aristocratic. How can uninformed men think all
round the globe? Democracy dies five miles from the parish pump. It will
be an aristocratic republic of all the capable men in the world....”
“Of course,” he added, pipe in mouth, as he poured out his whiskey,
“it's a big undertaking. It's an affair of centuries....”
And then, as a further afterthought: “All the more reason for getting to
work at it....”
In his moods of inspiration Prothero would discourse through the tobacco
smoke until that great world-state seemed imminent--and Part Two in the
Tripos a thing relatively remote. He would talk until the dimly-lit room
about him became impalpable, and the young men squatting about it in
elaborately careless attitudes caught glimpses of cities that are still
to be, bridges in wild places, deserts tamed and oceans conquered,
mankind no longer wasted by bickerings, going forward to the conquest of
the stars....
An aristocratic world-state; this political dream had already taken
hold of Benham's imagination when he came to town. But it was a dream,
something that had never existed, something that indeed may never
materialize, and such dreams, though they are vivid enough in a study at
night, fade and vanish at the rustle of a daily newspaper or the
sound of a passing band. To come back again.... So it was with Benham.
Sometimes he was set clearly towards this world-state that Prothero
had talked into possibility. Sometimes he was simply abreast of the
patriotic and socially constructive British Imperialism of Breeze and
Westerton. And there were moods when the two things were confused in his
mind, and the glamour of world dominion rested wonderfully on the slack
and straggling British Empire of Edward the Seventh--and Mr. Rudyard
Kipling and Mr. Chamberlain. He did go on for a time honestly
entertaining both these projects in his mind, each at its different
level, the greater impalpable one and the lesser concrete one within it.
In some unimaginable way he could suppose that the one by some miracle
of ennoblement--and neglecting the Frenchman, the Russian, the German,
the American, the Indian, the Chinaman, and, indeed, the greater part of
mankind from the problem--might become the other....
All of which is recorded here, without excess of comment, as it
happened, and as, in a mood of astonished reminiscences, he came finally
to perceive it, and set it down for White's meditative perusal.
4
But to the enthusiasm of the young, dreams have something of the
substance of reality and realities, something of the magic of dreams.
The London to which Benham came from Cambridge and the disquisitions of
Prothero was not the London of a mature and disillusioned vision. It was
London seen magnified and distorted through the young man's crystalline
intentions. It had for him a quality of multitudinous, unquenchable
activity. Himself filled with an immense appetite for life, he was
unable to conceive of London as fatigued. He could not suspect these
statesmen he now began to meet and watch, of jaded wills and petty
spites, he imagined that all the important and influential persons in
this large world of affairs were as frank in their private lives and as
unembarrassed in their financial relationships as his untainted self.
And he had still to reckon with stupidity. He believed in the statecraft
of leader-writers and the sincerity of political programmes. And so
regarded, what an avenue to Empire was Whitehall! How momentous was the
sunrise in St. James's Park, and how significant the clustering knot of
listeners and speakers beneath the tall column that lifts our Nelson to
the windy sky!
For a time Benham was in love with the idea of London. He got maps of
London and books about London. He made plans to explore its various
regions. He tried to grasp it all, from the conscious picturesqueness of
its garden suburbs to the factories of Croydon, from the clerk-villadoms
of Ealing to the inky streams of Bow. In those days there were passenger
steamboats that would take one from the meadows of Hampton Court past
the whole spectacle of London out to the shipping at Greenwich and the
towed liners, the incessant tugs, the heaving portals of the sea....
His time was far too occupied for him to carry out a tithe of these
expeditions he had planned, but he had many walks that bristled with
impressions. Northward and southward, eastward and westward a dreaming
young man could wander into a wilderness of population, polite or
sombre, poor, rich, or middle-class, but all ceaselessly active, all
urgently pressing, as it seemed, to their part in the drama of the
coming years. He loved the late afternoon, when every artery is injected
and gorged with the multitudinous home-going of the daily workers, he
loved the time of lighting up, and the clustering excitements of the
late hours. And he went out southward and eastward into gaunt regions of
reeking toil. As yet he knew nothing of the realities of industrialism.
He saw only the beauty of the great chimneys that rose against the
sullen smoke-barred sunsets, and he felt only the romance of the lurid
shuddering flares that burst out from squat stacks of brickwork and lit
the emptiness of strange and slovenly streets....
And this London was only the foreground of the great scene upon which
he, as a prosperous, well-befriended young Englishman, was free to
play whatever part he could. This narrow turbid tidal river by which he
walked ran out under the bridges eastward beneath the grey-blue clouds
towards Germany, towards Russia, and towards Asia, which still seemed in
those days so largely the Englishman's Asia. And when you turned about
at Blackfriars Bridge this sense of the round world was so upon you
that you faced not merely Westminster, but the icy Atlantic and America,
which one could yet fancy was a land of Englishmen--Englishmen a little
estranged. At any rate they assimilated, they kept the tongue. The
shipping in the lower reaches below the Tower there carried the flags of
every country under the sky.... As he went along the riverside he met a
group of dusky students, Chinese or Japanese. Cambridge had abounded in
Indians; and beneath that tall clock tower at Westminster it seemed as
though the world might centre. The background of the Englishman's world
reached indeed to either pole, it went about the earth, his background
it was--for all that he was capable of doing. All this had awaited
him....
Is it any wonder if a young man with an excitable imagination came at
times to the pitch of audible threats? If the extreme indulgence of his
opportunity and his sense of ability and vigour lifted his vanity at
moments to the kingly pitch? If he ejaculated and made a gesture or so
as he went along the Embankment?
5
In the disquisition upon choice that opened Benham's paper on
ARISTOCRACY, he showed himself momentarily wiser than his day-dreams.
For in these day-dreams he did seem to himself to be choosing among
unlimited possibilities. Yet while he dreamt other influences were
directing his movements. There were for instance his mother, Lady
Marayne, who saw a very different London from what he did, and his
mother Dame Nature, who cannot see London at all. She was busy in his
blood as she is busy in the blood of most healthy young men; common
experience must fill the gaps for us; and patiently and thoroughly
she was preparing for the entrance of that heroine, whom not the most
self-centred of heroes can altogether avoid....
And then there was the power of every day. Benham imagined himself at
large on his liberating steed of property while indeed he was mounted
on the made horse of Civilization; while he was speculating whither he
should go, he was already starting out upon the round. One hesitates
upon the magnificent plan and devotion of one's lifetime and meanwhile
there is usage, there are engagements. Every morning came Merkle, the
embodiment of the established routine, the herald of all that the world
expected and required Benham to be and do. Usually he awakened Benham
with the opening of his door and the soft tinkle of the curtain rings as
he let in the morning light. He moved softly about the room, gathering
up and removing the crumpled hulls of yesterday; that done he reappeared
at the bedside with a cup of admirable tea and one thin slice of
bread-and-butter, reported on the day's weather, stood deferential for
instructions. “You will be going out for lunch, sir. Very good, sir.
White slips of course, sir. You will go down into the country in the
afternoon? Will that be the serge suit, sir, or the brown?”
These matters settled, the new aristocrat could yawn and stretch like
any aristocrat under the old dispensation, and then as the sound of
running water from the bathroom ceased, stick his toes out of bed.
The day was tremendously indicated. World-states and aristocracies of
steel and fire, things that were as real as coal-scuttles in Billy's
rooms away there at Cambridge, were now remoter than Sirius.
He was expected to shave, expected to bath, expected to go in to
the bright warmth and white linen and silver and china of his
breakfast-table. And there he found letters and invitations, loaded with
expectation. And beyond the coffee-pot, neatly folded, lay the TIMES,
and the DAILY NEWS and the TELEGRAPH all with an air of requiring his
attention. There had been more fighting in Thibet and Mr. Ritchie had
made a Free Trade speech at Croydon. The Japanese had torpedoed another
Russian ironclad and a British cruiser was ashore in the East Indies. A
man had been found murdered in an empty house in Hoxton and the King
had had a conversation with General Booth. Tadpole was in for North
Winchelsea, beating Taper by nine votes, and there had been a new cut
in the Atlantic passenger rates. He was expected to be interested and
excited by these things.
Presently the telephone bell would ring and he would hear the clear
little voice of his mother full of imperative expectations. He would be
round for lunch? Yes, he would be round to lunch. And the afternoon, had
he arranged to do anything with his afternoon? No!--put off Chexington
until tomorrow. There was this new pianist, it was really an EXPERIENCE,
and one might not get tickets again. And then tea at Panton's. It was
rather fun at Panton's.... Oh!--Weston Massinghay was coming to lunch.
He was a useful man to know. So CLEVER.... So long, my dear little Son,
till I see you....
So life puts out its Merkle threads, as the poacher puts his hair noose
about the pheasant's neck, and while we theorize takes hold of us....
It came presently home to Benham that he had been down from Cambridge
for ten months, and that he was still not a step forward with the
realization of the new aristocracy. His political career waited. He had
done a quantity of things, but their net effect was incoherence. He had
not been merely passive, but his efforts to break away into creative
realities had added to rather than diminished his accumulating sense of
futility.
The natural development of his position under the influence of Lady
Marayne had enormously enlarged the circle of his acquaintances. He had
taken part in all sorts of social occasions, and sat and listened to
a representative selection of political and literary and social
personages, he had been several times to the opera and to a great number
and variety of plays, he had been attentively inconspicuous in several
really good week-end parties. He had spent a golden October in North
Italy with his mother, and escaped from the glowing lassitude of
Venice for some days of climbing in the Eastern Alps. In January, in an
outbreak of enquiry, he had gone with Lionel Maxim to St. Petersburg and
had eaten zakuska, brightened his eyes with vodka, talked with a number
of charming people of the war that was then imminent, listened to
gipsy singers until dawn, careered in sledges about the most silent
and stately of capitals, and returned with Lionel, discoursing upon
autocracy and assassination, Japan, the Russian destiny, and the
government of Peter the Great. That excursion was the most after his
heart of all the dispersed employments of his first year. Through the
rest of the winter he kept himself very fit, and still further qualified
that nervous dislike for the horse that he had acquired from Prothero by
hunting once a week in Essex. He was incurably a bad horseman; he rode
without sympathy, he was unready and convulsive at hedges and ditches,
and he judged distances badly. His white face and rigid seat and a
certain joylessness of bearing in the saddle earned him the singular
nickname, which never reached his ears, of the “Galvanized Corpse.”
He got through, however, at the cost of four quite trifling spills
and without damaging either of the horses he rode. And his physical
self-respect increased.
On his writing-desk appeared a few sheets of manuscript that increased
only very slowly. He was trying to express his Cambridge view of
aristocracy in terms of Finacue Street, West.
The artistic and intellectual movements of London had made their
various demands upon his time and energies. Art came to him with a
noble assumption of his interest and an intention that presently became
unpleasantly obvious to sell him pictures that he did not want to buy
and explain away pictures that he did. He bought one or two modern
achievements, and began to doubt if art and aristocracy had any
necessary connection. At first he had accepted the assumption that they
had. After all, he reflected, one lives rather for life and things than
for pictures of life and things or pictures arising out of life and
things. This Art had an air of saying something, but when one came to
grips with it what had it to say? Unless it was Yah! The drama, and more
particularly the intellectual drama, challenged his attention. In the
hands of Shaw, Barker, Masefield, Galsworthy, and Hankin, it, too, had
an air of saying something, but he found it extremely difficult to join
on to his own demands upon life anything whatever that the intellectual
drama had the air of having said. He would sit forward in the front row
of the dress-circle with his cheek on his hand and his brow slightly
knit. His intentness amused observant people. The drama that did not
profess to be intellectual he went to with Lady Marayne, and usually
on first nights. Lady Marayne loved a big first night at St. James's
Theatre or His Majesty's. Afterwards, perhaps, Sir Godfrey would join
them at a supper party, and all sorts of clever and amusing people would
be there saying keen intimate things about each other. He met Yeats, who
told amusing stories about George Moore, and afterwards he met George
Moore, who told amusing stories about Yeats, and it was all, he felt,
great fun for the people who were in it. But he was not in it, and he
had no very keen desire to be in it. It wasn't his stuff. He had,
though they were nowadays rather at the back of his mind, quite other
intentions. In the meanwhile all these things took up his time and
distracted his attention.
There was, as yet, no practicable aviation to beguile a young man of
spirit, but there were times when Benham found himself wondering whether
there might not be something rather creditable in the possession and
control of a motor-car of exceptional power. Only one might smash people
up. Should an aristocrat be deterred by the fear of smashing people up?
If it is a selfish fear of smashing people up, if it is nerves rather
than pity? At any rate it did not come to the car.
6