gloves and fan and theatre wrap, curled herself comfortably into the
abundantly cushioned corner by the fire, and proceeded to a mixture of
cross-examination and tirade that he found it difficult to make head
against. She was vibrating between distressed solicitude and resentful
anger. She was infuriated at his going away and deeply concerned at
what could have taken him away. “I was worried,” he said. “London is too
crowded to think in. I wanted to get myself alone.”
“And there I was while you were getting yourself alone, as you call it,
wearing my poor little brains out to think of some story to tell people.
I had to stuff them up you had a sprained knee at Chexington, and for
all I knew any of them might have been seeing you that morning. Besides
what has a boy like you to worry about? It's all nonsense, Poff.”
She awaited his explanations. Benham looked for a moment like his
father.
“I'm not getting on, mother,” he said. “I'm scattering myself. I'm
getting no grip. I want to get a better hold upon life, or else I do not
see what is to keep me from going to pieces--and wasting existence. It's
rather difficult sometimes to tell what one thinks and feels--”
She had not really listened to him.
“Who is that woman,” she interrupted suddenly, “Mrs. Fly-by-Night, or
some such name, who rings you up on the telephone?”
Benham hesitated, blushed, and regretted it.
“Mrs. Skelmersdale,” he said after a little pause.
“It's all the same. Who is she?”
“She's a woman I met at a studio somewhere, and I went with her to one
of those Dolmetsch concerts.”
He stopped.
Lady Marayne considered him in silence for a little while. “All men,”
she said at last, “are alike. Husbands, sons and brothers, they are all
alike. Sons! One expects them to be different. They aren't different.
Why should they be? I suppose I ought to be shocked, Poff. But I'm not.
She seems to be very fond of you.”
“She's--she's very good--in her way. She's had a difficult life....”
“You can't leave a man about for a moment,” Lady Marayne reflected.
“Poff, I wish you'd fetch me a glass of water.”
When he returned she was looking very fixedly into the fire. “Put it
down,” she said, “anywhere. Poff! is this Mrs. Helter-Skelter a discreet
sort of woman? Do you like her?” She asked a few additional particulars
and Benham made his grudging admission of facts. “What I still don't
understand, Poff, is why you have been away.”
“I went away,” said Benham, “because I want to clear things up.”
“But why? Is there some one else?”
“No.”
“You went alone? All the time?”
“I've told you I went alone. Do you think I tell you lies, mother?”
“Everybody tells lies somehow,” said Lady Marayne. “Easy lies or stiff
ones. Don't FLOURISH, Poff. Don't start saying things like a moral
windmill in a whirlwind. It's all a muddle. I suppose every one in
London is getting in or out of these entanglements--or something of
the sort. And this seems a comparatively slight one. I wish it hadn't
happened. They do happen.”
An expression of perplexity came into her face. She looked at him. “Why
do you want to throw her over?”
“I WANT to throw her over,” said Benham.
He stood up and went to the hearthrug, and his mother reflected that
this was exactly what all men did at just this phase of a discussion.
Then things ceased to be sensible.
From overhead he said to her: “I want to get away from this
complication, this servitude. I want to do some--some work. I want to
get my mind clear and my hands clear. I want to study government and the
big business of the world.”
“And she's in the way?”
He assented.
“You men!” said Lady Marayne after a little pause. “What queer beasts
you are! Here is a woman who is kind to you. She's fond of you. I could
tell she's fond of you directly I heard her. And you amuse yourself with
her. And then it's Gobble, Gobble, Gobble, Great Work, Hands Clear, Big
Business of the World. Why couldn't you think of that before, Poff? Why
did you begin with her?”
“It was unexpected....”
“STUFF!” said Lady Marayne for a second time. “Well,” she said, “well.
Your Mrs. Fly-by-Night,--oh it doesn't matter!--whatever she calls
herself, must look after herself. I can't do anything for her. I'm not
supposed even to know about her. I daresay she'll find her consolations.
I suppose you want to go out of London and get away from it all. I can
help you there, perhaps. I'm tired of London too. It's been a tiresome
season. Oh! tiresome and disappointing! I want to go over to Ireland and
travel about a little. The Pothercareys want us to come. They've asked
us twice....”
Benham braced himself to face fresh difficulties. It was amazing how
different the world could look from his mother's little parlour and from
the crest of the North Downs.
“But I want to start round the world,” he cried with a note of acute
distress. “I want to go to Egypt and India and see what is happening in
the East, all this wonderful waking up of the East, I know nothing of
the way the world is going--...”
“India!” cried Lady Marayne. “The East. Poff, what is the MATTER with
you? Has something happened--something else? Have you been having a love
affair?--a REAL love affair?”
“Oh, DAMN love affairs!” cried Benham. “Mother!--I'm sorry, mother! But
don't you see there's other things in the world for a man than having
a good time and making love. I'm for something else than that. You've
given me the splendidest time--...”
“I see,” cried Lady Marayne, “I see. I've bored you. I might have known
I should have bored you.”
“You've NOT bored me!” cried Benham.
He threw himself on the rug at her feet. “Oh, mother!” he said, “little,
dear, gallant mother, don't make life too hard for me. I've got to do my
job, I've got to find my job.”
“I've bored you,” she wept.
Suddenly she was weeping with all the unconcealed distressing grief of
a disappointed child. She put her pretty be-ringed little hands in front
of her face and recited the accumulation of her woes.
“I've done all I can for you, planned for you, given all my time for you
and I've BORED you.”
“Mother!”
“Don't come near me, Poff! Don't TOUCH me! All my plans. All my
ambitions. Friends--every one. You don't know all I've given up for
you....”
He had never seen his mother weep before. Her self-abandonment amazed
him. Her words were distorted by her tears. It was the most terrible and
distressing of crises....
“Go away from me! How can you help me? All I've done has been a failure!
Failure! Failure!”
8
That night the silences of Finacue Street heard Benham's voice again. “I
must do my job,” he was repeating, “I must do my job. Anyhow....”
And then after a long pause, like a watchword and just a little
unsurely: “Aristocracy....”
The next day his resolution had to bear the brunt of a second ordeal.
Mrs. Skelmersdale behaved beautifully and this made everything
tormentingly touching and difficult. She convinced him she was really
in love with him, and indeed if he could have seen his freshness and
simplicity through her experienced eyes he would have known there was
sound reason why she should have found him exceptional. And when his
clumsy hints of compensation could no longer be ignored she treated him
with a soft indignation, a tender resentment, that left him soft and
tender. She looked at him with pained eyes and a quiver of the lips.
What did he think she was? And then a little less credibly, did he think
she would have given herself to him if she hadn't been in love with him?
Perhaps that was not altogether true, but at any rate it was altogether
true to her when she said it, and it was manifest that she did not for
a moment intend him to have the cheap consolation of giving her money.
But, and that seemed odd to Benham, she would not believe, just as Lady
Marayne would not believe, that there was not some other woman in the
case. He assured her and she seemed reassured, and then presently she
was back at exactly the same question. Would no woman ever understand
the call of Asia, the pride of duty, the desire for the world?
One sort of woman perhaps....
It was odd that for the first time now, in the sunshine of Kensington
Gardens, he saw the little gossamer lines that tell that thirty years
and more have passed over a face, a little wrinkling of the eyelids, a
little hardening of the mouth. How slight it is, how invisible it
has been, how suddenly it appears! And the sunshine of the warm April
afternoon, heightened it may be by her determined unmercenary pose,
betrayed too the faintest hint of shabbiness in her dress. He had never
noticed these shadows upon her or her setting before and their effect
was to fill him with a strange regretful tenderness....
Perhaps men only begin to love when they cease to be dazzled and admire.
He had thought she might reproach him, he had felt and feared she might
set herself to stir his senses, and both these expectations had been
unjust to her he saw, now that he saw her beside him, a brave, rather
ill-advised and unlucky little struggler, stung and shamed. He forgot
the particulars of that first lunch of theirs together and he remembered
his mother's second contemptuous “STUFF!”
Indeed he knew now it had not been unexpected. Why hadn't he left this
little sensitive soul and this little sensitive body alone? And since
he hadn't done so, what right had he now to back out of their common
adventure? He felt a sudden wild impulse to marry Mrs. Skelmersdale, in
a mood between remorse and love and self-immolation, and then a sunlit
young woman with a leaping stride in her paces, passed across his
heavens, pointing to Asia and Utopia and forbidding even another thought
of the banns....
“You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won't you?” said Mrs. Skelmersdale,
brimming over. “You will do that.”
He couldn't keep his arm from her little shoulders. And as their lips
touched he suddenly found himself weeping also....
His spirit went limping from that interview. She chose to stay behind
in her chair and think, she said, and each time he turned back she was
sitting in the same attitude looking at him as he receded, and she had
one hand on the chair back and her arm drawn up to it. The third time he
waved his hat clumsily, and she started and then answered with her hand.
Then the trees hid her....
This sex business was a damnable business. If only because it made one
hurt women....
He had trampled on Mrs. Skelmersdale, he had hurt and disappointed
his mother. Was he a brute? Was he a cold-blooded prig? What was this
aristocracy? Was his belief anything more than a theory? Was he only
dreaming of a debt to the men in the quarry, to the miners, to the men
in the stokeholes, to the drudges on the fields? And while he dreamt he
wounded and distressed real living creatures in the sleep-walk of his
dreaming....
So long as he stuck to his dream he must at any rate set his face
absolutely against the establishment of any further relations with
women.
Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened and
tempered, who would understand.
9
So Benham was able to convert the unfortunate Mrs. Skelmersdale into a
tender but for a long time an entirely painful memory. But mothers are
not so easily disposed of, and more particularly a mother whose conduct
is coloured deeply by an extraordinary persuasion of having paid for her
offspring twice over. Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood
quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past
his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of
undefined obligation upon Benham's outlook. His resolution to go round
the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the
same time his mother's thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture
of remorse in him. It was constantly in his mind, like the suit of the
importunate widow, that he ought to devote his life to the little lady's
happiness and pride, and his reason told him that even if he wanted to
make this sacrifice he couldn't; the mere act of making it would produce
so entirely catastrophic a revulsion. He could as soon have become a
croquet champion or the curate of Chexington church, lines of endeavour
which for him would have led straightly and simply to sacrilegious
scandal or manslaughter with a mallet.
There is so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that it
was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the remorses of
this period of Benham's life were too complicated and scattered for a
cumulative effect. In the background of his mind and less subdued
than its importance could seem to warrant was his promise to bring the
Wilder-Morris people into relations with Lady Marayne. They had been so
delightful to him that he felt quite acutely the slight he was putting
upon them by this delay. Lady Marayne's moods, however, had been so
uncertain that he had found no occasion to broach this trifling matter,
and when at last the occasion came he perceived in the same instant the
fullest reasons for regretting it.
“Ah!” she said, hanging only for a moment, and then: “you told me you
were alone!”...
Her mind leapt at once to the personification of these people as all
that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from
London. They were the enemy, they had got hold of him.
“When I asked you if you were alone you pretended to be angry,” she
remembered with a flash. “You said, 'Do I tell lies?'”
“I WAS alone. Until-- It was an accident. On my walk I was alone.”
But he flinched before her accusing, her almost triumphant, forefinger.
From the instant she heard of them she hated these South Harting people
unrestrainedly. She made no attempt to conceal it. Her valiant bantam
spirit caught at this quarrel as a refuge from the rare and uncongenial
ache of his secession. “And who are they? What are they? What sort of
people can they be to drag in a passing young man? I suppose this girl
of theirs goes out every evening--Was she painted, Poff?”
She whipped him with her questions as though she was slashing his face.
He became dead-white and grimly civil, answering every question as
though it was the sanest, most justifiable inquiry.
“Of course I don't know who they are. How should I know? What need is
there to know?”
“There are ways of finding out,” she insisted. “If I am to go down and
make myself pleasant to these people because of you.”
“But I implore you not to.”
“And five minutes ago you were imploring me to! Of course I shall.”
“Oh well!--well!”
“One has to know SOMETHING of the people to whom one commits oneself,
surely.”
“They are decent people; they are well-behaved people.”
“Oh!--I'll behave well. Don't think I'll disgrace your casual
acquaintances. But who they are, what they are, I WILL know....”
On that point Lady Marayne was to score beyond her utmost expectations.
“Come round,” she said over the telephone, two mornings later. “I've
something to tell you.”
She was so triumphant that she was sorry for him. When it came to
telling him, she failed from her fierceness.
“Poff, my little son,” she said, “I'm so sorry I hardly know how to tell
you. Poff, I'm sorry. I have to tell you--and it's utterly beastly.”
“But what?” he asked.
“These people are dreadful people.”
“But how?”
“You've heard of the great Kent and Eastern Bank smash and the
Marlborough Building Society frauds eight or nine years ago?”
“Vaguely. But what has that to do with them?”
“That man Morris.”
She stopped short, and Benham nodded for her to go on.
“Her father,” said Lady Marayne.
“But who was Morris? Really, mother, I don't remember.”
“He was sentenced to seven years--ten years--I forget. He had done all
sorts of dreadful things. He was a swindler. And when he went out of the
dock into the waiting-room-- He had a signet ring with prussic acid in
it--...”
“I remember now,” he said.
A silence fell between them.
Benham stood quite motionless on the hearthrug and stared very hard at
the little volume of Henley's poetry that lay upon the table.
He cleared his throat presently.
“You can't go and see them then,” he said. “After all--since I am going
abroad so soon--... It doesn't so very much matter.”
10
To Benham it did not seem to be of the slightest importance that
Amanda's father was a convicted swindler who had committed suicide.
Never was a resolved and conscious aristocrat so free from the
hereditary delusion. Good parents, he was convinced, are only an
advantage in so far as they have made you good stuff, and bad parents
are no discredit to a son or daughter of good quality. Conceivably he
had a bias against too close an examination of origins, and he held that
the honour of the children should atone for the sins of the fathers and
the questionable achievements of any intervening testator. Not half a
dozen rich and established families in all England could stand even the
most conventional inquiry into the foundations of their pride, and
only a universal amnesty could prevent ridiculous distinctions. But he
brought no accusation of inconsistency against his mother. She looked at
things with a lighter logic and a kind of genius for the acceptance
of superficial values. She was condoned and forgiven, a rescued lamb,
re-established, notoriously bright and nice, and the Morrises were
damned. That was their status, exclusion, damnation, as fixed as colour
in Georgia or caste in Bengal. But if his mother's mind worked in that
way there was no reason why his should. So far as he was concerned, he
told himself, it did not matter whether Amanda was the daughter of a
swindler or the daughter of a god. He had no doubt that she herself had
the spirit and quality of divinity. He had seen it.
So there was nothing for it in the failure of his mother's civilities
but to increase his own. He would go down to Harting and take his leave
of these amiable outcasts himself. With a certain effusion. He would do
this soon because he was now within sight of the beginning of his world
tour. He had made his plans and prepared most of his equipment. Little
remained to do but the release of Merkle, the wrappering and locking up
of Finacue Street, which could await him indefinitely, and the buying of
tickets. He decided to take the opportunity afforded by a visit of Sir
Godfrey and Lady Marayne to the Blights, big iron people in the North of
England of so austere a morality that even Benham was ignored by it. He
announced his invasion in a little note to Mrs. Wilder. He parted from
his mother on Friday afternoon; she was already, he perceived, a little
reconciled to his project of going abroad; and contrived his arrival
at South Harting for that sunset hour which was for his imagination the
natural halo of Amanda.
“I'm going round the world,” he told them simply. “I may be away for
two years, and I thought I would like to see you all again before I
started.”
That was quite the way they did things.
The supper-party included Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, who displayed a curious
tendency to drift in between Benham and Amanda, a literary youth with
a Byronic visage, very dark curly hair, and a number of extraordinarily
mature chins, a girl-friend of Betty's who had cycled down from London,
and who it appeared maintained herself at large in London by drawing for
advertisements, and a silent colourless friend of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders.
The talk lit by Amanda's enthusiasm circled actively round Benham's
expedition. It was clear that the idea of giving some years to thinking
out one's possible work in the world was for some reason that remained
obscure highly irritating to both Mr. Rathbone-Sanders and the Byronic
youth. Betty too regarded it as levity when there was “so much to be
done,” and the topic whacked about and rose to something like a
wrangle, and sat down and rested and got up again reinvigorated, with
a continuity of interest that Benham had never yet encountered in any
London gathering. He made a good case for his modern version of the
Grand Tour, and he gave them something of his intellectual enthusiasm
for the distances and views, the cities and seas, the multitudinous wide
spectacle of the world he was to experience. He had been reading about
Benares and North China. As he talked Amanda, who had been animated at
first, fell thoughtful and silent. And then it was discovered that the
night was wonderfully warm and the moon shining. They drifted out into
the garden, but Mr. Rathbone-Sanders was suddenly entangled and drawn
back by Mrs. Wilder and the young woman from London upon some technical
point, and taken to the work-table in the corner of the dining-room to
explain. He was never able to get to the garden.
Benham found himself with Amanda upon a side path, a little isolated by
some swaggering artichokes and a couple of apple trees and so forth from
the general conversation. They cut themselves off from the continuation
of that by a little silence, and then she spoke abruptly and with the
quickness of a speaker who has thought out something to say and fears
interruption: “Why did you come down here?”
“I wanted to see you before I went.”
“You disturb me. You fill me with envy.”
“I didn't think of that. I wanted to see you again.”
“And then you will go off round the world, you will see the Tropics, you
will see India, you will go into Chinese cities all hung with vermilion,
you will climb mountains. Oh! men can do all the splendid things. Why do
you come here to remind me of it? I have never been anywhere, anywhere
at all. I never shall go anywhere. Never in my life have I seen a
mountain. Those Downs there--look at them!--are my highest. And while
you are travelling I shall think of you--and think of you....”
“Would YOU like to travel?” he asked as though that was an extraordinary
idea.
“Do you think EVERY girl wants to sit at home and rock a cradle?”
“I never thought YOU did.”
“Then what did you think I wanted?”
“What DO you want?”
She held her arms out widely, and the moonlight shone in her eyes as she
turned her face to him.
“Just what you want,” she said; “--THE WHOLE WORLD!
“Life is like a feast,” she went on; “it is spread before everybody and
nobody must touch it. What am I? Just a prisoner. In a cottage garden.
Looking for ever over a hedge. I should be happier if I couldn't look.
I remember once, only a little time ago, there was a cheap excursion to
London. Our only servant went. She had to get up at an unearthly hour,
and I--I got up too. I helped her to get off. And when she was gone I
went up to my bedroom again and cried. I cried with envy for any one,
any one who could go away. I've been nowhere--except to school at
Chichester and three or four times to Emsworth and Bognor--for eight
years. When you go”--the tears glittered in the moonlight--“I shall cry.
It will be worse than the excursion to London.... Ever since you were
here before I've been thinking of it.”
It seemed to Benham that here indeed was the very sister of his spirit.
His words sprang into his mind as one thinks of a repartee. “But why
shouldn't you come too?” he said.
She stared at him in silence. The two white-lit faces examined each
other. Both she and Benham were trembling.
“COME TOO?” she repeated.
“Yes, with me.”
“But--HOW?”
Then suddenly she was weeping like a child that is teased; her troubled
eyes looked out from under puckered brows. “You don't mean it,” she
said. “You don't mean it.”
And then indeed he meant it.
“Marry me,” he said very quickly, glancing towards the dark group at the
end of the garden. “And we will go together.”
He seized her arm and drew her to him. “I love you,” he said. “I love
your spirit. You are not like any one else.”
There was a moment's hesitation.
Both he and she looked to see how far they were still alone.
Then they turned their dusky faces to each other. He drew her still
closer.
“Oh!” she said, and yielded herself to be kissed. Their lips touched,
and for a moment he held her lithe body against his own.
“I want you,” he whispered close to her. “You are my mate. From the
first sight of you I knew that....”
They embraced--alertly furtive.
Then they stood a little apart. Some one was coming towards them.
Amanda's bearing changed swiftly. She put up her little face to his,
confidently and intimately.
“Don't TELL any one,” she whispered eagerly shaking his arm to emphasize
her words. “Don't tell any one--not yet. Not for a few days....”
She pushed him from her quickly as the shadowy form of Betty appeared in
a little path between the artichokes and raspberry canes.
“Listening to the nightingales?” cried Betty.
“Yes, aren't they?” said Amanda inconsecutively.
“That's our very own nightingale!” cried Betty advancing. “Do you hear
it, Mr. Benham? No, not that one. That is a quite inferior bird that
performs in the vicarage trees....”
11