of his aristocratic experiments was the advice that was coming to him
from every quarter. It came in extraordinary variety and volume, but
always it had one unvarying feature. It ignored and tacitly contradicted
his private intentions.
We are all of us disposed to be propagandists of our way of living, and
the spectacle of a wealthy young man quite at large is enough to excite
the most temperate of us without distinction of age or sex. “If I were
you,” came to be a familiar phrase in his ear. This was particularly the
case with political people; and they did it not only from the natural
infirmity of humanity, but because, when they seemed reluctant or
satisfied with him as he was, Lady Marayne egged them on.
There was a general assumption that he was to go into Parliament, and
most of his counsellors assumed further that on the whole his natural
sympathies would take him into the Conservative party. But it was
pointed out to him that just at present the Liberal party was the party
of a young man's opportunity; sooner or later the swing of the pendulum
which would weed the Conservatives and proliferate Liberals was bound to
come, there was always more demand and opportunity for candidates on
the Liberal side, the Tariff Reformers were straining their ministerial
majority to the splitting point, and most of the old Liberal leaders had
died off during the years of exile. The party was no longer
dominated; it would tolerate ideas. A young man who took a distinctive
line--provided it was not from the party point of view a vexatious or
impossible line--might go very rapidly far and high. On the other hand,
it was urged upon him that the Tariff Reform adventure called also
for youth and energy. But there, perhaps, there was less scope for
the distinctive line--and already they had Garvin. Quite a number
of Benham's friends pointed out to him the value of working out some
special aspect of our national political interests. A very useful
speciality was the Balkans. Mr. Pope, the well-known publicist, whose
very sound and considerable reputation was based on the East Purblow
Labour Experiment, met Benham at lunch and proposed to go with him in
a spirit of instructive association to the Balkans, rub up their Greek
together, and settle the problem of Albania. He wanted, he said, a
foreign speciality to balance his East Purblow interest. But Lady Beach
Mandarin warned Benham against the Balkans; the Balkans were getting
to be too handy for Easter and summer holidays, and now that there were
several good hotels in Servia and Montenegro and Sofia, they were
being overdone. Everybody went to the Balkans and came back with a pet
nationality. She loathed pet nationalities. She believed most people
loathed them nowadays. It was stale: it was GLADSTONIAN. She was all for
specialization in social reform. She thought Benham ought to join the
Fabian Society and consult the Webbs. Quite a number of able young men
had been placed with the assistance of the Webbs. They were, she said,
“a perfect fount....” Two other people, independently of each other,
pointed out to Benham the helpfulness of a few articles in the
half-crown monthlies....
“What are the assumptions underlying all this?” Benham asked himself in
a phase of lucidity.
And after reflection. “Good God! The assumptions! What do they think
will satisfy me?...”
Everybody, however, did not point to Parliament. Several people seemed
to think Travel, with a large T, was indicated. One distant cousin of
Sir Godfrey's, the kind of man of the world who has long moustaches, was
for big game shooting. “Get right out of all this while you are young,”
he said. “There's nothing to compare with stopping a charging lion
at twenty yards. I've done it, my boy. You can come back for all this
pow-wow afterwards.” He gave the diplomatic service as a second choice.
“There you are,” he said, “first-rate social position, nothing to do,
theatres, operas, pretty women, colour, life. The best of good times.
Barring Washington, that is. But Washington, they say, isn't as bad as
it used to be--since Teddy has Europeanized 'em....”
Even the Reverend Harold Benham took a subdued but thoughtful share in
his son's admonition. He came up to the flat--due precautions were taken
to prevent a painful encounter--he lunched at his son's new club, and he
was visibly oppressed by the contrast between the young man's youthful
fortunes and his own. As visibly he bore up bravely. “There are few men,
Poff, who would not envy you your opportunities,” he said. “You have the
Feast of Life spread out at your feet.... I hope you have had yourself
put up for the Athenaeum. They say it takes years. When I was a young
man--and ambitious--I thought that some day I might belong to the
Athenaeum.... One has to learn....”
7
And with an effect of detachment, just as though it didn't belong to
the rest of him at all, there was beginning a sort of backstairs and
underside to Benham's life. There is no need to discuss how inevitable
that may or may not be in the case of a young man of spirit and
large means, nor to embark upon the discussion of the temptations and
opportunities of large cities. Several ladies, of various positions and
qualities, had reflected upon his manifest need of education. There was
in particular Mrs. Skelmersdale, a very pretty little widow with hazel
eyes, black hair, a mobile mouth, and a pathetic history, who talked of
old music to him and took him to a Dolmetsch concert in Clifford's Inn,
and expanded that common interest to a general participation in
his indefinite outlook. She advised him about his probable
politics--everybody did that--but when he broke through his usual
reserve and suggested views of his own, she was extraordinarily
sympathetic. She was so sympathetic and in such a caressing way that
she created a temporary belief in her understanding, and it was quite
imperceptibly that he was drawn into the discussion of modern ethical
problems. She herself was a rather stimulating instance of modern
ethical problems. She told him something of her own story, and then
their common topics narrowed down very abruptly. He found he could help
her in several ways. There is, unhappily, a disposition on the part of
many people, who ought to know better, to regard a role played by Joseph
during his earlier days in Egypt as a ridiculous one. This point of view
became very inopportunely dominant in Benham's mind when he was lunching
TETE A TETE with Mrs. Skelmersdale at her flat....
The ensuing intimacy was of an entirely concealed and respectable
nature, but a certain increased preoccupation in his manner set Lady
Marayne thinking. He had as a matter of fact been taken by surprise.
Still he perceived that it is no excuse for a man that he has been taken
by surprise. Surprises in one's own conduct ought not to happen. When
they do happen then an aristocrat ought to stick to what he had done. He
was now in a subtle and complicated relationship to Mrs. Skelmersdale,
a relationship in which her pride had become suddenly a matter of
tremendous importance. Once he had launched himself upon this affair, it
was clear to him that he owed it to her never to humiliate her. And to
go back upon himself now would be a tremendous humiliation for her. You
see, he had helped her a little financially. And she looked to him, she
wanted him....
She wasn't, he knew, altogether respectable. Indeed, poor dear, her
ethical problems, already a little worn, made her seem at times anything
but respectable. He had met her first one evening at Jimmy Gluckstein's
when he was forming his opinion of Art. Her manifest want of interest
in pictures had attracted him. And that had led to music. And to the
mention of a Clementi piano, that short, gentle, sad, old, little sort
of piano people will insist upon calling a spinet, in her flat.
And so to this....
It was very wonderful and delicious, this first indulgence of sense.
It was shabby and underhand.
The great god Pan is a glorious god. (And so was Swinburne.) And what
can compare with the warmth of blood and the sheen of sunlit limbs?
But Priapus....
She was the most subtle, delightful and tender of created beings.
She had amazing streaks of vulgarity.
And some astonishing friends.
Once she had seemed to lead the talk deliberately to money matters.
She loved him and desired him. There was no doubt of it.
There was a curious effect about her as though when she went round the
corner she would become somebody else. And a curious recurrent feeling
that round the corner there was somebody else.
He had an extraordinary feeling that his mother knew about this
business. This feeling came from nothing in her words or acts, but from
some indefinable change in her eyes and bearing towards him. But how
could she know?
It was unlikely that she and Mrs. Skelmersdale would ever meet, and it
seemed to him that it would be a particularly offensive incident for
them to meet.
There were times now when life took on a grey and boring quality such
as it had never had before he met Mrs. Skelmersdale, and the only
remedy was to go to her. She could restore his nervous tranquillity, his
feeling of solidity and reality, his pride in himself. For a time, that
is.
Nevertheless his mind was as a whole pervaded by the feeling that he
ought not to have been taken by surprise.
And he had the clearest conviction in his mind that if now he could be
put back again to the day before that lunch....
No! he should not have gone there to lunch.
He had gone there to see her Clementi piano.
Had he or had he not thought beforehand of any other possibility?
On a point so vital his memory was curiously unsure.
8
The worry and disorganization of Benham's life and thoughts increased as
the spring advanced. His need in some way to pull things together became
overpowering. He began to think of Billy Prothero, more and more did it
seem desirable to have a big talk with Billy and place everything that
had got disturbed. Benham thought of going to Cambridge for a week of
exhaustive evenings. Small engagements delayed that expedition....
Then came a day in April when all the world seemed wrong to Benham. He
was irritable; his will was unstable; whatever presented itself to be
done presented itself as undesirable; he could settle to nothing. He had
been keeping away from Mrs. Skelmersdale and in the morning there came a
little note from her designed to correct this abstention. She understood
the art of the attractive note. But he would not decide to go to her. He
left the note unanswered.
Then came his mother at the telephone and it became instantly certain to
Benham that he could not play the dutiful son that evening. He answered
her that he could not come to dinner. He had engaged himself. “Where?”
“With some men.”
There was a pause and then his mother's voice came, flattened by
disappointment. “Very well then, little Poff. Perhaps I shall see you
to-morrow.”
He replaced the receiver and fretted back into his study, where the
notes on aristocracy lay upon his desk, the notes he had been pretending
to work over all the morning.
“Damned liar!” he said, and then, “Dirty liar!” He decided to lunch at
the club, and in the afternoon he was moved to telephone an appointment
with his siren. And having done that he was bound to keep it.
About one o'clock in the morning he found himself walking back to
Finacue Street. He was no longer a fretful conflict of nerves, but if
anything he was less happy than he had been before. It seemed to him
that London was a desolate and inglorious growth.
London ten years ago was much less nocturnal than it is now. And not so
brightly lit. Down the long streets came no traffic but an occasional
hansom. Here and there a cat halted or bolted in the road. Near
Piccadilly a policeman hovered artfully in a doorway, and then came a
few belated prostitutes waylaying the passers-by, and a few youths and
men, wearily lust driven.
As he turned up New Bond Street he saw a figure that struck him
as familiar. Surely!--it was Billy Prothero! Or at any rate it was
astonishingly like Billy Prothero. He glanced again and the likeness
was more doubtful. The man had his back to Benham, he was halting and
looking back at a woman.
By some queer flash of intuition it came to Benham that even if this
was not Prothero, still Prothero did these things. It might very well
be Prothero even, though, as he now saw, it wasn't. Everybody did these
things....
It came into Benham's head for the first time that life could be
tiresome.
This Bond Street was a tiresome place; with its shops all shut and
muffled, its shops where in the crowded daytime one bought costly
furniture, costly clothes, costly scent, sweets, bibelots, pictures,
jewellery, presents of all sorts, clothes for Mrs. Skelmersdale, sweets
for Mrs. Skelmersdale, presents for Mrs. Skelmersdale, all the elaborate
fittings and equipage of--THAT!
“Good night, dear,” a woman drifted by him.
“I've SAID good night,” he cried, “I've SAID good night,” and so went
on to his flat. The unquenchable demand, the wearisome insatiability
of sex! When everything else has gone, then it shows itself bare in the
bleak small hours. And at first it had seemed so light a matter! He went
to bed, feeling dog-tired, he went to bed at an hour and with a finished
completeness that Merkle would have regarded as entirely becoming in a
young gentleman of his position.
And a little past three o'clock in the morning he awoke to a mood of
indescribable desolation. He awoke with a start to an agony of remorse
and self-reproach.
9
For a time he lay quite still staring at the darkness, then he groaned
and turned over. Then, suddenly, like one who fancies he hears a strange
noise, he sat up in bed and listened. “Oh, God!” he said at last.
And then: “Oh! The DIRTINESS of life! The dirty muddle of life!
“What are we doing with life? What are we all doing with life?
“It isn't only this poor Milly business. This only brings it to a head.
Of course she wants money....”
His thoughts came on again.
“But the ugliness!
“Why did I begin it?”
He put his hands upon his knees and pressed his eyes against the backs
of his hands and so remained very still, a blankness beneath his own
question.
After a long interval his mind moved again.
And now it was as if he looked upon his whole existence, he seemed to
see in a large, clear, cold comprehensiveness, all the wasted days, the
fruitless activities, the futilities, the perpetual postponements
that had followed his coming to London. He saw it all as a joyless
indulgence, as a confusion of playthings and undisciplined desires, as
a succession of days that began amiably and weakly, that became steadily
more crowded with ignoble and trivial occupations, that had sunken now
to indignity and uncleanness. He was overwhelmed by that persuasion,
which only freshly soiled youth can feel in its extreme intensity, that
life was slipping away from him, that the sands were running out, that
in a little while his existence would be irretrievably lost.
By some trick of the imagination he saw life as an interminable Bond
Street, lit up by night lamps, desolate, full of rubbish, full of the
very best rubbish, trappings, temptations, and down it all he drove, as
the damned drive, wearily, inexplicably.
WHAT ARE WE UP TO WITH LIFE! WHAT ARE WE MAKING OF LIFE!
But hadn't he intended to make something tremendous of life? Hadn't he
come to London trailing a glory?...
He began to remember it as a project. It was the project of a great
World-State sustained by an aristocracy of noble men. He was to have
been one of those men, too fine and far-reaching for the dull manoeuvers
of such politics as rule the world to-day. The project seemed still
large, still whitely noble, but now it was unlit and dead, and in the
foreground he sat in the flat of Mrs. Skelmersdale, feeling dissipated
and fumbling with his white tie. And she was looking tired. “God!” he
said. “How did I get there?”
And then suddenly he reached out his arms in the darkness and prayed
aloud to the silences.
“Oh, God! Give me back my visions! Give me back my visions!”
He could have imagined he heard a voice calling upon him to come out
into life, to escape from the body of this death. But it was his own
voice that called to him....
10
The need for action became so urgent in him, that he got right out of
his bed and sat on the edge of it. Something had to be done at once. He
did not know what it was but he felt that there could be no more sleep,
no more rest, no dressing nor eating nor going forth before he came to
decisions. Christian before his pilgrimage began was not more certain of
this need of flight from the life of routine and vanities.
What was to be done?
In the first place he must get away and think about it all, think
himself clear of all these--these immediacies, these associations and
relations and holds and habits. He must get back to his vision, get back
to the God in his vision. And to do that he must go alone.
He was clear he must go alone. It was useless to go to Prothero, one
weak man going to a weaker. Prothero he was convinced could help him not
at all, and the strange thing is that this conviction had come to him
and had established itself incontestably because of that figure at the
street corner, which had for just one moment resembled Prothero. By some
fantastic intuition Benham knew that Prothero would not only participate
but excuse. And he knew that he himself could endure no excuses. He
must cut clear of any possibility of qualification. This thing had to be
stopped. He must get away, he must get free, he must get clean. In the
extravagance of his reaction Benham felt that he could endure nothing
but solitary places and to sleep under the open sky.
He wanted to get right away from London and everybody and lie in the
quiet darkness and stare up at the stars.
His plans grew so definite that presently he was in his dressing-gown
and turning out the maps in the lower drawer of his study bureau. He
would go down into Surrey with a knapsack, wander along the North Downs
until the Guildford gap was reached, strike across the Weald country to
the South Downs and then beat eastward. The very thought of it brought
a coolness to his mind. He knew that over those southern hills one could
be as lonely as in the wilderness and as free to talk to God. And there
he would settle something. He would make a plan for his life and end
this torment.
When Merkle came in to him in the morning he was fast asleep.
The familiar curtain rings awakened Benham. He turned his head over,
stared for a moment and then remembered.
“Merkle,” he said, “I am going for a walking tour. I am going off this
morning. Haven't I a rucksack?”
“You 'ave a sort of canvas bag, sir, with pockets to it,” said Merkle.
“Will you be needing the VERY 'eavy boots with 'obnails--Swiss, I fancy,
sir--or your ordinary shooting boots?”
“And when may I expect you back, sir?” asked Merkle as the moment for
departure drew near.
“God knows,” said Benham, “I don't.”
“Then will there be any address for forwarding letters, sir?”
Benham hadn't thought of that. For a moment he regarded Merkle's
scrupulous respect with a transient perplexity.
“I'll let you know, Merkle,” he said. “I'll let you know.”
For some days at least, notes, telephone messages, engagements, all this
fuss and clamour about nothing, should clamour for him in vain....
11
“But how closely,” cried White, in a mood of cultivated enthusiasm; “how
closely must all the poor little stories that we tell to-day follow
in the footsteps of the Great Exemplars! A little while ago and the
springtime freshness of Tobias irradiated the page. Now see! it is
Christian--.”
Indeed it looked extremely like Christian as Benham went up across the
springy turf from Epsom Downs station towards the crest of the hill.
Was he not also fleeing in the morning sunlight from the City of
Destruction? Was he not also seeking that better city whose name is
Peace? And there was a bundle on his back. It was the bundle, I think,
that seized most firmly upon the too literary imagination of White.
But the analogy of the bundle was a superficial one. Benham had not
the slightest desire to lose it from his shoulders. It would have
inconvenienced him very greatly if he had done so. It did not contain
his sins. Our sins nowadays are not so easily separated. It contained a
light, warm cape-coat he had bought in Switzerland and which he intended
to wrap about him when he slept under the stars, and in addition
Merkle had packed it with his silk pyjamas, an extra pair of stockings,
tooth-brush, brush and comb, a safety razor.... And there were several
sheets of the Ordnance map.
12
The urgency of getting away from something dominated Benham to the
exclusion of any thought of what he might be getting to. That muddle of
his London life had to be left behind. First, escape....
Over the downs great numbers of larks were singing. It was warm April
that year and early. All the cloud stuff in the sky was gathered
into great towering slow-sailing masses, and the rest was blue of
the intensest. The air was so clean that Benham felt it clean in the
substance of his body. The chestnuts down the hill to the right were
flowering, the beeches were luminously green, and the oaks in the
valley foaming gold. And sometimes it was one lark filled his ears, and
sometimes he seemed to be hearing all the larks for miles about him.
Presently over the crest he would be out of sight of the grand stand and
the men exercising horses, and that brace of red-jacketed golfers....
What was he to do?
For a time he could think of nothing to do except to keep up and out of
the valley. His whole being seemed to have come to his surfaces to look
out at the budding of the year and hear the noise of the birds. And then
he got into a long road from which he had to escape, and trespassing
southward through plantations he reached the steep edge of the hills
and sat down over above a great chalk pit somewhere near Dorking and
surveyed all the tumbled wooded spaces of the Weald.... It is after all
not so great a country this Sussex, nor so hilly, from deepest valley to
highest crest is not six hundred feet, yet what a greatness of effect it
can achieve! There is something in those downland views which, like sea
views, lifts a mind out to the skies. All England it seemed was there to
Benham's vision, and the purpose of the English, and his own purpose in
the world. For a long time he surveyed the large delicacy of the detail
before him, the crests, the tree-protected houses, the fields and
farmsteads, the distant gleams of water. And then he became interested
in the men who were working in the chalk pit down below.
They at any rate were not troubled with the problem of what to do with
their lives.
13
Benham found his mind was now running clear, and so abundantly that he
could scarcely, he felt, keep pace with it. As he thought his flow of
ideas was tinged with a fear that he might forget what he was thinking.
In an instant, for the first time in his mental existence, he could have
imagined he had discovered Labour and seen it plain. A little while ago
and he had seemed a lonely man among the hills, but indeed he was not
lonely, these men had been with him all the time, and he was free to
wander, to sit here, to think and choose simply because those men down
there were not free. HE WAS SPENDING THEIR LEISURE.... Not once but
many times with Prothero had he used the phrase RICHESSE OBLIGE. Now
he remembered it. He began to remember a mass of ideas that had been
overlaid and stifling within him. This was what Merkle and the club
servants and the entertainments and engagements and his mother and
the artistic touts and the theatrical touts and the hunting and the
elaboration of games and--Mrs. Skelmersdale and all that had clustered
thickly round him in London had been hiding from him. Those men below
there had not been trusted to choose their work; they had been given it.
And he had been trusted....
And now to grapple with it! Now to get it clear! What work was he going
to do? That settled, he would deal with his distractions readily enough.
Until that was settled he was lax and exposed to every passing breeze of
invitation.
“What work am I going to do? What work am I going to do?” He repeated
it.