down!” he cried. “Shut up, you brutes!” and was at a loss for further
action.
Then it was Amanda leapt into his world, a light, tall figure of a girl,
fluttering a short petticoat. Hatless she was, brown, flushed, and her
dark hair tossing loose, and in a moment she had the snarling furious
dogs apart, each gripped firmly by its collar. Then with a wriggle
black was loose and had closed again. Inspired by the best traditions of
chivalry Benham came to her assistance. He was not expert with dogs. He
grasped the black dog under its ear. He was bitten in the wrist, rather
in excitement than malice, and with a certain excess of zeal he was
strangling the brute before you could count ten.
Amanda seized the fallen stick and whacked the dog she held, reasonably
but effectively until its yelps satisfied her. “There!” she said
pitching her victim from her, and stood erect again. She surveyed the
proceedings of her helper for the first time.
“You needn't,” she said, “choke Sultan anymore.”
“Ugh!” she said, as though that was enough for Sultan. And peace was
restored.
“I'm obliged to you. But--... I say! He didn't bite you, did he? Oh,
SULTAN!”
Sultan tried to express his disgust at the affair. Rotten business.
When a fellow is fighting one can't be meticulous. And if people come
interfering. Still--SORRY! So Sultan by his code of eye and tail.
“May I see?... Something ought to be done to this....”
She took his wrist in her hand, and her cheek and eyelashes came within
a foot of his face.
Some observant element in his composition guessed, and guessed quite
accurately, that she was nineteen....
2
She had an eyebrow like a quick stroke of a camel's-hair brush, she
had a glowing face, half childish imp, half woman, she had honest hazel
eyes, a voice all music, a manifest decision of character. And he must
have this bite seen to at once. She lived not five minutes away. He must
come with her.
She had an aunt who behaved like a mother and a mother who behaved like
a genteel visitor, and they both agreed with Amanda that although Mr.
Walter Long and his dreadful muzzles and everything did seem to have
stamped out rabies, yet you couldn't be too careful with a dog bite. A
dog bite might be injurious in all sorts of ways--particularly
Sultan's bite. He was, they had to confess, a dog without refinement,
a coarse-minded omnivorous dog. Both the elder ladies insisted upon
regarding Benham's wound as clear evidence of some gallant rescue of
Amanda from imminent danger--“she's always so RECKLESS with those dogs,”
as though Amanda was not manifestly capable of taking care of herself;
and when he had been Listerined and bandaged, they would have it that he
should join them at their supper-dinner, which was already prepared and
waiting. They treated him as if he were still an undergraduate, they
took his arrangements in hand as though he was a favourite nephew. He
must stay in Harting that night. Both the Ship and the Coach and Horses
were excellent inns, and over the Downs there would be nothing for miles
and miles....
The house was a little long house with a verandah and a garden in front
of it with flint-edged paths; the room in which they sat and ate was
long and low and equipped with pieces of misfitting good furniture, an
accidental-looking gilt tarnished mirror, and a sprinkling of old and
middle-aged books. Some one had lit a fire, which cracked and spurted
about cheerfully in a motherly fireplace, and a lamp and some candles
got lit. Mrs. Wilder, Amanda's aunt, a comfortable dark broad-browed
woman, directed things, and sat at the end of the table and placed
Benham on her right hand between herself and Amanda. Amanda's mother
remained undeveloped, a watchful little woman with at least an eyebrow
like her daughter's. Her name, it seemed, was Morris. No servant
appeared, but two cousins of a vague dark picturesqueness and with a
stamp of thirty upon them, the first young women Benham had ever seen
dressed in djibbahs, sat at the table or moved about and attended to the
simple needs of the service. The reconciled dogs were in the room and
shifted inquiring noses from one human being to another.
Amanda's people were so easy and intelligent and friendly, and
Benham after his thirty hours of silence so freshly ready for human
association, that in a very little while he could have imagined he had
known and trusted this household for years. He had never met such people
before, and yet there was something about them that seemed familiar--and
then it occurred to him that something of their easy-going freedom was
to be found in Russian novels. A photographic enlargement of somebody
with a vegetarian expression of face and a special kind of slouch hat
gave the atmosphere a flavour of Socialism, and a press and tools and
stamps and pigments on an oak table in the corner suggested some such
socialistic art as bookbinding. They were clearly 'advanced' people. And
Amanda was tremendously important to them, she was their light, their
pride, their most living thing. They focussed on her. When he talked to
them all in general he talked to her in particular. He felt that some
introduction of himself was due to these welcoming people. He tried
to give it mixed with an itinerary and a sketch of his experiences. He
praised the heather country and Harting Coombe and the Hartings. He
told them that London had suddenly become intolerable--“In the spring
sunshine.”
“You live in London?” said Mrs. Wilder.
Yes. And he had wanted to think things out. In London one could do no
thinking--
“Here we do nothing else,” said Amanda.
“Except dog-fights,” said the elder cousin.
“I thought I would just wander and think and sleep in the open air. Have
you ever tried to sleep in the open air?”
“In the summer we all do,” said the younger cousin. “Amanda makes us. We
go out on to the little lawn at the back.”
“You see Amanda has some friends at Limpsfield. And there they all go
out and camp and sleep in the woods.”
“Of course,” reflected Mrs. Wilder, “in April it must be different.”
“It IS different,” said Benham with feeling; “the night comes five hours
too soon. And it comes wet.” He described his experiences and his flight
to Shere and the kindly landlord and the cup of coffee. “And after that
I thought with a vengeance.”
“Do you write things?” asked Amanda abruptly, and it seemed to him with
a note of hope.
“No. No, it was just a private puzzle. It was something I couldn't get
straight.”
“And you have got it straight?” asked Amanda.
“I think so.”
“You were making up your mind about something?”
“Amanda DEAR!” cried her mother.
“Oh! I don't mind telling you,” said Benham.
They seemed such unusual people that he was moved to unusual
confidences. They had that effect one gets at times with strangers
freshly met as though they were not really in the world. And there was
something about Amanda that made him want to explain himself to her
completely.
“What I wanted to think about was what I should do with my life.”
“Haven't you any WORK--?” asked the elder cousin.
“None that I'm obliged to do.”
“That's where a man has the advantage,” said Amanda with the tone of
profound reflection. “You can choose. And what are you going to do with
your life?”
“Amanda,” her mother protested, “really you mustn't!”
“I'm going round the world to think about it,” Benham told her.
“I'd give my soul to travel,” said Amanda.
She addressed her remark to the salad in front of her.
“But have you no ties?” asked Mrs. Wilder.
“None that hold me,” said Benham. “I'm one of those unfortunates who
needn't do anything at all. I'm independent. You see my riddles. East
and west and north and south, it's all my way for the taking. There's
not an indication.”
“If I were you,” said Amanda, and reflected. Then she half turned
herself to him. “I should go first to India,” she said, “and I should
shoot, one, two, three, yes, three tigers. And then I would see
Farukhabad Sikri--I was reading in a book about it yesterday--where the
jungle grows in the palaces; and then I would go right up the Himalayas,
and then, then I would have a walking tour in Japan, and then I would
sail in a sailing ship down to Borneo and Java and set myself up as a
Ranee--... And then I would think what I would do next.”
“All alone, Amanda?” asked Mrs. Wilder.
“Only when I shoot tigers. You and mother should certainly come to
Japan.”
“But Mr. Benham perhaps doesn't intend to shoot tigers, Amanda?” said
Amanda's mother.
“Not at once. My way will be a little different. I think I shall go
first through Germany. And then down to Constantinople. And then I've
some idea of getting across Asia Minor and Persia to India. That would
take some time. One must ride.”
“Asia Minor ought to be fun,” said Amanda. “But I should prefer India
because of the tigers. It would be so jolly to begin with the tigers
right away.”
“It is the towns and governments and peoples I want to see rather than
tigers,” said Benham. “Tigers if they are in the programme. But I want
to find out about--other things.”
“Don't you think there's something to be found out at home?” said the
elder cousin, blushing very brightly and speaking with the effort of one
who speaks for conscience' sake.
“Betty's a Socialist,” Amanda said to Benham with a suspicion of
apology.
“Well, we're all rather that,” Mrs. Wilder protested.
“If you are free, if you are independent, then don't you owe something
to the workers?” Betty went on, getting graver and redder with each
word.
“It's just because of that,” said Benham, “that I am going round the
world.”
3
He was as free with these odd people as if he had been talking to
Prothero. They were--alert. And he had been alone and silent and full of
thinking for two clear days. He tried to explain why he found Socialism
at once obvious and inadequate....
Presently the supper things got themselves put away and the talk moved
into a smaller room with several armchairs and a fire. Mrs. Wilder and
the cousins and Amanda each smoked a cigarette as if it were symbolical,
and they were joined by a grave grey-bearded man with a hyphenated name
and slightly Socratic manner, dressed in a very blue linen shirt
and collar, a very woolly mustard-coloured suit and loose tie, and
manifestly devoted to one of those branches of exemplary domestic
decoration that grow upon Socialist soil in England. He joined Betty in
the opinion that the duty of a free and wealthy young man was to remain
in England and give himself to democratic Socialism and the abolition
of “profiteering.” “Consider that chair,” he said. But Benham had little
feeling for the craftsmanship of chairs.
Under cross-examination Mr. Rathbone-Sanders became entangled and
prophetic. It was evident he had never thought out his “democratic,” he
had rested in some vague tangle of idealism from which Benham now set
himself with the zeal of a specialist to rout him. Such an argument
sprang up as one meets with rarely beyond the happy undergraduate's
range. Everybody lived in the discussion, even Amanda's mother listened
visibly. Betty said she herself was certainly democratic and Mrs. Wilder
had always thought herself to be so, and outside the circle round the
fire Amanda hovered impatiently, not quite sure of her side as yet, but
eager to come down with emphasis at the first flash of intimation.
She came down vehemently on Benham's.
And being a very clear-cutting personality with an instinct for the
material rendering of things, she also came and sat beside him on the
little square-cornered sofa.
“Of course, Mr. Rathbone-Sanders,” she said, “of course the world must
belong to the people who dare. Of course people aren't all alike, and
dull people, as Mr. Benham says, and spiteful people, and narrow people
have no right to any voice at all in things....”
4
In saying this she did but echo Benham's very words, and all she
said and did that evening was in quick response to Benham's earnest
expression of his views. She found Benham a delightful novelty. She
liked to argue because there was no other talk so lively, and she had
perhaps a lurking intellectual grudge against Mr. Rathbone-Sanders
that made her welcome an ally. Everything from her that night that even
verges upon the notable has been told, and yet it sufficed, together
with something in the clear, long line of her limbs, in her voice,
in her general physical quality, to convince Benham that she was the
freest, finest, bravest spirit that he had ever encountered.
In the papers he left behind him was to be found his perplexed
endeavours to explain this mental leap, that after all his efforts still
remained unexplained. He had been vividly impressed by the decision and
courage of her treatment of the dogs; it was just the sort of thing
he could not do. And there was a certain contagiousness in the petting
admiration with which her family treated her. But she was young and
healthy and so was he, and in a second mystery lies the key of the
first. He had fallen in love with her, and that being so whatever he
needed that instantly she was. He needed a companion, clean and brave
and understanding....
In his bed in the Ship that night he thought of nothing but her before
he went to sleep, and when next morning he walked on his way over
the South Downs to Chichester his mind was full of her image and of a
hundred pleasant things about her. In his confessions he wrote, “I felt
there was a sword in her spirit. I felt she was as clean as the wind.”
Love is the most chastening of powers, and he did not even remember now
that two days before he had told the wind and the twilight that he would
certainly “roll and rollick in women” unless there was work for him to
do. She had a peculiarly swift and easy stride that went with him in his
thoughts along the turf by the wayside halfway and more to Chichester.
He thought always of the two of them as being side by side. His
imagination became childishly romantic. The open down about him with its
scrub of thorn and yew became the wilderness of the world, and through
it they went--in armour, weightless armour--and they wore long swords.
There was a breeze blowing and larks were singing and something,
something dark and tortuous dashed suddenly in headlong flight from
before their feet. It was an ethical problem such as those Mrs.
Skelmersdale nursed in her bosom. But at the sight of Amanda it had
straightened out--and fled....
And interweaving with such imaginings, he was some day to record, there
were others. She had brought back to his memory the fancies that had
been aroused in his first reading of Plato's REPUBLIC; she made him
think of those women Guardians, who were the friends and mates of men.
He wanted now to re-read that book and the LAWS. He could not remember
if the Guardians were done in the LAWS as well as in the REPUBLIC. He
wished he had both these books in his rucksack, but as he had not, he
decided he would hunt for them in Chichester. When would he see Amanda
again? He would ask his mother to make the acquaintance of these very
interesting people, but as they did not come to London very much it
might be some time before he had a chance of seeing her again.
And, besides, he was going to America and India. The prospect of an
exploration of the world was still noble and attractive; but he realized
it would stand very much in the way of his seeing more of Amanda. Would
it be a startling and unforgivable thing if presently he began to write
to her? Girls of that age and spirit living in out-of-the-way villages
have been known to marry....
Marriage didn't at this stage strike Benham as an agreeable aspect of
Amanda's possibilities; it was an inconvenience; his mind was running
in the direction of pedestrian tours in armour of no particular weight,
amidst scenery of a romantic wildness....
When he had gone to the house and taken his leave that morning it had
seemed quite in the vein of the establishment that he should be received
by Amanda alone and taken up the long garden before anybody else
appeared, to see the daffodils and the early apple-trees in blossom and
the pear-trees white and delicious.
Then he had taken his leave of them all and made his social tentatives.
Did they ever come to London? When they did they must let his people
know. He would so like them to know his mother, Lady Marayne. And so on
with much gratitude.
Amanda had said that she and the dogs would come with him up the hill,
she had said it exactly as a boy might have said it, she had brought him
up to the corner of Up Park and had sat down there on a heap of stones
and watched him until he was out of sight, waving to him when he looked
back. “Come back again,” she had cried.
In Chichester he found a little green-bound REPUBLIC in a second-hand
book-shop near the Cathedral, but there was no copy of the LAWS to
be found in the place. Then he was taken with the brilliant idea of
sleeping the night in Chichester and going back next day via Harting to
Petersfield station and London. He carried out this scheme and got to
South Harting neatly about four o'clock in the afternoon. He found
Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Morris and Amanda and the dogs entertaining Mr.
Rathbone-Sanders at tea, and they all seemed a little surprised, and,
except Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, they all seemed pleased to see him again
so soon. His explanation of why he hadn't gone back to London from
Chichester struck him as a little unconvincing in the cold light of Mr.
Rathbone-Sanders' eye. But Amanda was manifestly excited by his return,
and he told them his impressions of Chichester and described the
entertainment of the evening guest at a country inn and suddenly
produced his copy of the REPUBLIC. “I found this in a book-shop,” he
said, “and I brought it for you, because it describes one of the best
dreams of aristocracy there has ever been dreamt.”
At first she praised it as a pretty book in the dearest little binding,
and then realized that there were deeper implications, and became
grave and said she would read it through and through, she loved such
speculative reading.
She came to the door with the others and stayed at the door after they
had gone in again. When he looked back at the corner of the road to
Petersfield she was still at the door and waved farewell to him.
He only saw a light slender figure, but when she came back into the
sitting-room Mr. Rathbone-Sanders noted the faint flush in her cheek and
an unwonted abstraction in her eye.
And in the evening she tucked her feet up in the armchair by the lamp
and read the REPUBLIC very intently and very thoughtfully, occasionally
turning over a page.
5
When Benham got back to London he experienced an unwonted desire to
perform his social obligations to the utmost.
So soon as he had had some dinner at his club he wrote his South Harting
friends a most agreeable letter of thanks for their kindness to him. In
a little while he hoped he should see them again. His mother, too, was
most desirous to meet them.... That done, he went on to his flat and to
various aspects of life for which he was quite unprepared.
But here we may note that Amanda answered him. Her reply came some four
days later. It was written in a square schoolgirl hand, it covered
three sheets of notepaper, and it was a very intelligent essay upon the
REPUBLIC of Plato. “Of course,” she wrote, “the Guardians are inhuman,
but it was a glorious sort of inhumanity. They had a spirit--like sharp
knives cutting through life.”
It was her best bit of phrasing and it pleased Benham very much.
But, indeed, it was not her own phrasing, she had culled it from a
disquisition into which she had led Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, and she had
sent it to Benham as she might have sent him a flower.
6
Benham re-entered the flat from which he had fled so precipitately with
three very definite plans in his mind. The first was to set out upon
his grand tour of the world with as little delay as possible, to shut
up this Finacue Street establishment for a long time, and get rid of
the soul-destroying perfections of Merkle. The second was to end his
ill-advised intimacy with little Mrs. Skelmersdale as generously and
cheerfully as possible. The third was to bring Lady Marayne into social
relations with the Wilder and Morris MENAGE at South Harting. It did not
strike him that there was any incompatibility among these projects or
any insurmountable difficulty in any of them until he was back in his
flat.
The accumulation of letters, packages and telephone memoranda upon his
desk included a number of notes and slips to remind him that both Mrs.
Skelmersdale and his mother were ladies of some determination. Even as
he stood turning over the pile of documents the mechanical vehemence of
the telephone filled him with a restored sense of the adverse will in
things. “Yes, mam,” he heard Merkle's voice, “yes, mam. I will tell
him, mam. Will you keep possession, mam.” And then in the doorway of the
study, “Mrs. Skelmersdale, sir. Upon the telephone, sir.”
Benham reflected with various notes in his hand. Then he went to the
telephone.
“You Wicked Boy, where have you been hiding?”
“I've been away. I may have to go away again.”
“Not before you have seen me. Come round and tell me all about it.”
Benham lied about an engagement.
“Then to-morrow in the morning.”... Impossible.
“In the afternoon. You don't WANT to see me.” Benham did want to see
her.
“Come round and have a jolly little evening to-morrow night. I've got
some more of that harpsichord music. And I'm dying to see you. Don't you
understand?”
Further lies. “Look here,” said Benham, “can you come and have a talk
in Kensington Gardens? You know the place, near that Chinese garden.
Paddington Gate....”
The lady's voice fell to flatness. She agreed. “But why not come to see
me HERE?” she asked.
Benham hung up the receiver abruptly.
He walked slowly back to his study. “Phew!” he whispered to himself.
It was like hitting her in the face. He didn't want to be a brute,
but short of being a brute there was no way out for him from this
entanglement. Why, oh! why the devil had he gone there to lunch?...
He resumed his examination of the waiting letters with a ruffled mind.
The most urgent thing about them was the clear evidence of gathering
anger on the part of his mother. He had missed a lunch party at Sir
Godfrey's on Tuesday and a dinner engagement at Philip Magnet's, quite
an important dinner in its way, with various promising young Liberals,
on Wednesday evening. And she was furious at “this stupid mystery.
Of course you're bound to be found out, and of course there will be a
scandal.”... He perceived that this last note was written on his own
paper. “Merkle!” he cried sharply.
“Yessir!”
Merkle had been just outside, on call.
“Did my mother write any of these notes here?” he asked.
“Two, sir. Her ladyship was round here three times, sir.”
“Did she see all these letters?”
“Not the telephone calls, sir. I 'ad put them on one side. But.... It's
a little thing, sir.”
He paused and came a step nearer. “You see, sir,” he explained with the
faintest flavour of the confidential softening his mechanical respect,
“yesterday, when 'er ladyship was 'ere, sir, some one rang up on the
telephone--”
“But you, Merkle--”
“Exactly, sir. But 'er ladyship said 'I'LL go to that, Merkle,' and just
for a moment I couldn't exactly think 'ow I could manage it, sir, and
there 'er ladyship was, at the telephone. What passed, sir, I couldn't
'ear. I 'eard her say, 'Any message?' And I FANCY, sir, I 'eard 'er say,
'I'm the 'ousemaid,' but that, sir, I think must have been a mistake,
sir.”
“Must have been,” said Benham. “Certainly--must have been. And the call
you think came from--?”
“There again, sir, I'm quite in the dark. But of course, sir, it's
usually Mrs. Skelmersdale, sir. Just about her time in the afternoon. On
an average, sir....”
7
“I went out of London to think about my life.”
It was manifest that Lady Marayne did not believe him.
“Alone?” she asked.
“Of course alone.”
“STUFF!” said Lady Marayne.