a lyrical interlude. It should be possible to tell, in that
ecstatic manner which melts words into moonshine, makes prose almost
uncomfortably rhythmic, and brings all the freshness of every spring
that ever was across the page, of the joyous exaltation of the happy
lover. This at any rate was what White had always done in his novels
hitherto, and what he would certainly have done at this point had he had
the telling of Benham's story uncontrolledly in his hands. But, indeed,
indeed, in real life, in very truth, the heart has not this simplicity.
Only the heroes of romance, and a few strong simple clean-shaven
Americans have that much emotional integrity. (And even the Americans do
at times seem to an observant eye to be putting in work at the job and
keeping up their gladness.) Benham was excited that night, but not
in the proper bright-eyed, red-cheeked way; he did not dance down the
village street of Harting to his harbour at the Ship, and the expression
in his eyes as he sat on the edge of his bed was not the deep elemental
wonder one could have wished there, but amazement. Do not suppose
that he did not love Amanda, that a rich majority of his being was not
triumphantly glad to have won her, that the image of the two armour-clad
lovers was not still striding and flourishing through the lit wilderness
of his imagination. For three weeks things had pointed him to this.
They would do everything together now, he and his mate, they would scale
mountains together and ride side by side towards ruined cities across
the deserts of the World. He could have wished no better thing. But at
the same time, even as he felt and admitted this and rejoiced at it, the
sky of his mind was black with consternation....
It is remarkable, White reflected, as he turned over the abundant but
confused notes upon this perplexing phase of Benham's development that
lay in the third drawer devoted to the Second Limitation, how dependent
human beings are upon statement. Man is the animal that states a case.
He lives not in things but in expressed ideas, and what was troubling
Benham inordinately that night, a night that should have been devoted to
purely blissful and exalted expectations, was the sheer impossibility of
stating what had happened in any terms that would be tolerable either
to Mrs. Skelmersdale or Lady Marayne. The thing had happened with the
suddenness of a revelation. Whatever had been going on in the less
illuminated parts of his mind, his manifest resolution had been
merely to bid South Harting good-bye-- And in short they would never
understand. They would accuse him of the meanest treachery. He could see
his mother's face, he could hear her voice saying, “And so because of
this sudden infatuation for a swindler's daughter, a girl who runs about
the roads with a couple of retrievers hunting for a man, you must
spoil all my plans, ruin my year, tell me a lot of pretentious stuffy
lies....” And Mrs. Skelmersdale too would say, “Of course he just talked
of the world and duty and all that rubbish to save my face....”
It wasn't so at all.
But it looked so frightfully like it!
Couldn't they realize that he had fled out of London before ever he had
seen Amanda? They might be able to do it perhaps, but they never would.
It just happened that in the very moment when the edifice of his noble
resolutions had been ready, she had stepped into it--out of nothingness
and nowhere. She wasn't an accident; that was just the point upon which
they were bound to misjudge her; she was an embodiment. If only he could
show her to them as she had first shown herself to him, swift, light, a
little flushed from running but not in the least out of breath, quick
as a leopard upon the dogs.... But even if the improbable opportunity
arose, he perceived it might still be impossible to produce the Amanda
he loved, the Amanda of the fluttering short skirt and the clear
enthusiastic voice. Because, already he knew she was not the only
Amanda. There was another, there might be others, there was this
perplexing person who had flashed into being at the very moment of their
mutual confession, who had produced the entirely disconcerting demand
that nobody must be told. Then Betty had intervened. But that sub-Amanda
and her carneying note had to be dealt with on the first occasion,
because when aristocrats love they don't care a rap who is told and who
is not told. They just step out into the light side by side....
“Don't tell any one,” she had said, “not for a few days....”
This sub-Amanda was perceptible next morning again, flitting about in
the background of a glad and loving adventuress, a pre-occupied Amanda
who had put her head down while the real Amanda flung her chin up and
contemplated things on the Asiatic scale, and who was apparently engaged
in disentangling something obscure connected with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders
that ought never to have been entangled....
“A human being,” White read, “the simplest human being, is a clustering
mass of aspects. No man will judge another justly who judges everything
about him. And of love in particular is this true. We love not persons
but revelations. The woman one loves is like a goddess hidden in a
shrine; for her sake we live on hope and suffer the kindred priestesses
that make up herself. The art of love is patience till the gleam
returns....”
Sunday and Monday did much to develop this idea of the intricate
complexity of humanity in Benham's mind. On Monday morning he went
up from the Ship again to get Amanda alone and deliver his ultimatum
against a further secrecy, so that he could own her openly and have no
more of the interventions and separations that had barred him from any
intimate talk with her throughout the whole of Sunday. The front door
stood open, the passage hall was empty, but as he hesitated whether he
should proclaim himself with the knocker or walk through, the door of
the little drawing-room flew open and a black-clad cylindrical clerical
person entirely unknown to Benham stumbled over the threshold, blundered
blindly against him, made a sound like “MOO” and a pitiful gesture with
his arm, and fled forth....
It was a curate and he was weeping bitterly....
Benham stood in the doorway and watched a clumsy broken-hearted flight
down the village street.
He had been partly told and partly left to infer, and anyhow he was
beginning to understand about Mr. Rathbone-Sanders. That he could
dismiss. But--why was the curate in tears?
12
He found Amanda standing alone in the room from which this young man
had fled. She had a handful of daffodils in her hand, and others were
scattered over the table. She had been arranging the big bowl of flowers
in the centre. He left the door open behind him and stopped short with
the table between them. She looked up at him--intelligently and calmly.
Her pose had a divine dignity.
“I want to tell them now,” said Benham without a word of greeting.
“Yes,” she said, “tell them now.”
They heard steps in the passage outside. “Betty!” cried Amanda.
Her mother's voice answered, “Do you want Betty?”
“We want you all,” answered Amanda. “We have something to tell you....”
“Carrie!” they heard Mrs. Morris call her sister after an interval, and
her voice sounded faint and flat and unusual. There was the soft hissing
of some whispered words outside and a muffled exclamation. Then Mrs.
Wilder and Mrs. Morris and Betty came into the room. Mrs. Wilder came
first, and Mrs. Morris with an alarmed face as if sheltering behind her.
“We want to tell you something,” said Amanda.
“Amanda and I are going to marry each other,” said Benham, standing in
front of her.
For an instant the others made no answer; they looked at each other.
“BUT DOES HE KNOW?” Mrs. Morris said in a low voice.
Amanda turned her eyes to her lover. She was about to speak, she seemed
to gather herself for an effort, and then he knew that he did not want
to hear her explanation. He checked her by a gesture.
“I KNOW,” he said, and then, “I do not see that it matters to us in the
least.”
He went to her holding out both his hands to her.
She took them and stood shyly for a moment, and then the watchful
gravity of her face broke into soft emotion. “Oh!” she cried and seized
his face between her hands in a passion of triumphant love and kissed
him.
And then he found himself being kissed by Mrs. Morris.
She kissed him thrice, with solemnity, with thankfulness, with relief,
as if in the act of kissing she transferred to him precious and entirely
incalculable treasures.
CHAPTER THE FOURTH ~~ THE SPIRITED HONEYMOON
1
It was a little after sunrise one bright morning in September that
Benham came up on to the deck of the sturdy Austrian steamboat that was
churning its way with a sedulous deliberation from Spalato to Cattaro,
and lit himself a cigarette and seated himself upon a deck chair. Save
for a yawning Greek sailor busy with a mop the first-class deck was
empty.
Benham surveyed the haggard beauty of the Illyrian coast. The mountains
rose gaunt and enormous and barren to a jagged fantastic silhouette
against the sun; their almost vertical slopes still plunged in blue
shadow, broke only into a little cold green and white edge of olive
terraces and vegetation and houses before they touched the clear blue
water. An occasional church or a house perched high upon some seemingly
inaccessible ledge did but accentuate the vast barrenness of the land.
It was a land desolated and destroyed. At Ragusa, at Salona, at Spalato
and Zara and Pola Benham had seen only variations upon one persistent
theme, a dwindled and uncreative human life living amidst the giant
ruins of preceding times, as worms live in the sockets of a skull.
Forward an unsavoury group of passengers still slumbered amidst
fruit-peel and expectorations, a few soldiers, some squalid brigands
armed with preposterous red umbrellas, a group of curled-up human lumps
brooded over by an aquiline individual caparisoned with brass like a
horse, his head wrapped picturesquely in a shawl. Benham surveyed these
last products of the “life force” and resumed his pensive survey of the
coast. The sea was deserted save for a couple of little lateen craft
with suns painted on their gaudy sails, sea butterflies that hung
motionless as if unawakened close inshore....
The travel of the last few weeks had impressed Benham's imagination
profoundly. For the first time in his life he had come face to face
with civilization in defeat. From Venice hitherward he had marked with
cumulative effect the clustering evidences of effort spent and power
crumbled to nothingness. He had landed upon the marble quay of Pola and
visited its deserted amphitheatre, he had seen a weak provincial life
going about ignoble ends under the walls of the great Venetian fortress
and the still more magnificent cathedral of Zara; he had visited
Spalato, clustered in sweltering grime within the ample compass of the
walls of Diocletian's villa, and a few troublesome sellers of coins and
iridescent glass and fragments of tessellated pavement and such-like
loot was all the population he had found amidst the fallen walls and
broken friezes and columns of Salona. Down this coast there ebbed and
flowed a mean residual life, a life of violence and dishonesty, peddling
trades, vendettas and war. For a while the unstable Austrian ruled
this land and made a sort of order that the incalculable chances of
international politics might at any time shatter. Benham was drawing
near now to the utmost limit of that extended peace. Ahead beyond the
mountain capes was Montenegro and, further, Albania and Macedonia,
lands of lawlessness and confusion. Amanda and he had been warned of the
impossibility of decent travel beyond Cattaro and Cettinje but this had
but whetted her adventurousness and challenged his spirit. They were
going to see Albania for themselves.
The three months of honeymoon they had been spending together had
developed many remarkable divergences of their minds that had not been
in the least apparent to Benham before their marriage. Then their
common resolve to be as spirited as possible had obliterated all minor
considerations. But that was the limit of their unanimity. Amanda loved
wild and picturesque things, and Benham strong and clear things; the
vines and brushwood amidst the ruins of Salona that had delighted her
had filled him with a sense of tragic retrogression. Salona had revived
again in the acutest form a dispute that had been smouldering between
them throughout a fitful and lengthy exploration of north and central
Italy. She could not understand his disgust with the mediaeval colour
and confusion that had swamped the pride and state of the Roman empire,
and he could not make her feel the ambition of the ruler, the essential
discipline and responsibilities of his aristocratic idea. While his
adventurousness was conquest, hers, it was only too manifest, was
brigandage. His thoughts ran now into the form of an imaginary
discourse, that he would never deliver to her, on the decay of states,
on the triumphs of barbarians over rulers who will not rule, on the
relaxation of patrician orders and the return of the robber and assassin
as lordship decays. This coast was no theatrical scenery for him; it was
a shattered empire. And it was shattered because no men had been found,
united enough, magnificent and steadfast enough, to hold the cities,
and maintain the roads, keep the peace and subdue the brutish hates and
suspicions and cruelties that devastated the world.
And as these thoughts came back into his mind, Amanda flickered up from
below, light and noiseless as a sunbeam, and stood behind his chair.
Freedom and the sight of the world had if possible brightened and
invigorated her. Her costume and bearing were subtly touched by the
romance of the Adriatic. There was a flavour of the pirate in the cloak
about her shoulders and the light knitted cap of scarlet she had stuck
upon her head. She surveyed his preoccupation for a moment, glanced
forward, and then covered his eyes with her hands. In almost the same
movement she had bent down and nipped the tip of his ear between her
teeth.
“Confound you, Amanda!”
“You'd forgotten my existence, you star-gazing Cheetah. And then, you
see, these things happen to you!”
“I was thinking.”
“Well--DON'T.... I distrust your thinking. This coast is wilder and
grimmer than yesterday. It's glorious....”
She sat down on the chair he unfolded for her.
“Is there nothing to eat?” she asked abruptly.
“It is too early.”
2
“This coast is magnificent,” she said presently.
“It's hideous,” he answered. “It's as ugly as a heap of slag.”
“It's nature at its wildest.”
“That's Amanda at her wildest.”
“Well, isn't it?”
“No! This land isn't nature. It's waste. Not wilderness. It's the other
end. Those hills were covered with forests; this was a busy civilized
coast just a little thousand years ago. The Venetians wasted it.
They cut down the forests; they filled the cities with a mixed mud of
population, THAT stuff. Look at it”!--he indicated the sleepers forward
by a movement of his head.
“I suppose they WERE rather feeble people,” said Amanda.
“Who?”
“The Venetians.”
“They were traders--and nothing more. Just as we are. And when they were
rich they got splendid clothes and feasted and rested. Much as we do.”
Amanda surveyed him. “We don't rest.”
“We idle.”
“We are seeing things.”
“Don't be a humbug, Amanda. We are making love. Just as they did. And
it has been--ripping. In Salona they made love tremendously. They did
nothing else until the barbarians came over the mountains....”
“Well,” said Amanda virtuously, “we will do something else.”
He made no answer and her expression became profoundly thoughtful. Of
course this wandering must end. He had been growing impatient for some
time. But it was difficult, she perceived, to decide just what to do
with him....
Benham picked up the thread of his musing.
He was seeing more and more clearly that all civilization was an effort,
and so far always an inadequate and very partially successful effort.
Always it had been aristocratic, aristocratic in the sense that it was
the work of minorities, who took power, who had a common resolution
against the inertia, the indifference, the insubordination and
instinctive hostility of the mass of mankind. And always the set-backs,
the disasters of civilization, had been failures of the aristocratic
spirit. Why had the Roman purpose faltered and shrivelled? Every order,
every brotherhood, every organization carried with it the seeds of
its own destruction. Must the idea of statecraft and rule perpetually
reappear, reclothe itself in new forms, age, die, even as life
does--making each time its almost infinitesimal addition to human
achievement? Now the world is crying aloud for a renascence of the
spirit that orders and controls. Human affairs sway at a dizzy height of
opportunity. Will they keep their footing there, or stagger? We have
got back at last to a time as big with opportunity as the early empire.
Given only the will in men and it would be possible now to turn the
dazzling accidents of science, the chancy attainments of the nineteenth
century, into a sane and permanent possession, a new starting point....
What a magnificence might be made of life!
He was aroused by Amanda's voice.
“When we go back to London, old Cheetah,” she said, “we must take a
house.”
For some moments he stared at her, trying to get back to their point of
divergence.
“Why?” he asked at length.
“We must have a house,” she said.
He looked at her face. Her expression was profoundly thoughtful, her
eyes were fixed on the slumbering ships poised upon the transparent
water under the mountain shadows.
“You see,” she thought it out, “you've got to TELL in London. You can't
just sneak back there. You've got to strike a note of your own. With all
these things of yours.”
“But how?”
“There's a sort of little house, I used to see them when I was a girl
and my father lived in London, about Brook Street and that part. Not
too far north.... You see going back to London for us is just another
adventure. We've got to capture London. We've got to scale it. We've
got advantages of all sorts. But at present we're outside. We've got to
march in.”
Her clear hazel eyes contemplated conflicts and triumphs.
She was roused by Benham's voice.
“What the deuce are you thinking of, Amanda?”
She turned her level eyes to his. “London,” she said. “For you.”
“I don't want London,” he said.
“I thought you did. You ought to. I do.”
“But to take a house! Make an invasion of London!”
“You dear old Cheetah, you can't be always frisking about in the
wilderness, staring at the stars.”
“But I'm not going back to live in London in the old way, theatres,
dinner-parties, chatter--”
“Oh no! We aren't going to do that sort of thing. We aren't going to
join the ruck. We'll go about in holiday times all over the world. I
want to see Fusiyama. I mean to swim in the South Seas. With you. We'll
dodge the sharks. But all the same we shall have to have a house in
London. We have to be FELT there.”
She met his consternation fairly. She lifted her fine eyebrows. Her
little face conveyed a protesting reasonableness.
“Well, MUSTN'T we?”
She added, “If we want to alter the world we ought to live in the
world.”
Since last they had disputed the question she had thought out these new
phrases.
“Amanda,” he said, “I think sometimes you haven't the remotest idea of
what I am after. I don't believe you begin to suspect what I am up to.”
She put her elbows on her knees, dropped her chin between her hands and
regarded him impudently. She had a characteristic trick of looking up
with her face downcast that never failed to soften his regard.
“Look here, Cheetah, don't you give way to your early morning habit of
calling your own true love a fool,” she said.
“Simply I tell you I will not go back to London.”
“You will go back with me, Cheetah.”
“I will go back as far as my work calls me there.”
“It calls you through the voice of your mate and slave and doormat to
just exactly the sort of house you ought to have.... It is the privilege
and duty of the female to choose the lair.”
For a space Benham made no reply. This controversy had been gathering
for some time and he wanted to state his view as vividly as possible.
The Benham style of connubial conversation had long since decided for
emphasis rather than delicacy.
“I think,” he said slowly, “that this wanting to take London by storm is
a beastly VULGAR thing to want to do.”
Amanda compressed her lips.
“I want to work out things in my mind,” he went on. “I do not want to
be distracted by social things, and I do not want to be distracted by
picturesque things. This life--it's all very well on the surface, but it
isn't real. I'm not getting hold of reality. Things slip away from me.
God! but how they slip away from me!”
He got up and walked to the side of the boat.
She surveyed his back for some moments. Then she went and leant over the
rail beside him.
“I want to go to London,” she said.
“I don't.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Where I can see into the things that hold the world together.”
“I have loved this wandering--I could wander always. But... Cheetah! I
tell you I WANT to go to London.”
He looked over his shoulder into her warm face. “NO,” he said.
“But, I ask you.”
He shook his head.
She put her face closer and whispered. “Cheetah! big beast of my heart.
Do you hear your mate asking for something?”
He turned his eyes back to the mountains. “I must go my own way.”
“Haven't I, so far, invented things, made life amusing, Cheetah? Can't
you trust the leopard's wisdom?”
He stared at the coast inexorably.
“I wonder,” she whispered.
“What?”
“You ARE that, Cheetah, that lank, long, EAGER beast--.”
Suddenly with a nimble hand she had unbuttoned and rolled up the sleeve
of her blouse. She stuck her pretty blue-veined arm before his eyes.
“Look here, sir, it was you, wasn't it? It was your powerful jaw
inflicted this bite upon the arm of a defenceless young leopardess--”
“Amanda!”
“Well.” She wrinkled her brows.
He turned about and stood over her, he shook a finger in her face and
there was a restrained intensity in his voice as he spoke.
“Look here, Amanda!” he said, “if you think that you are going to
make me agree to any sort of project about London, to any sort of
complication of our lives with houses in smart streets and a campaign of
social assertion--by THAT, then may I be damned for an uxorious fool!”
Her eyes met his and there was mockery in her eyes.
“This, Cheetah, is the morning mood,” she remarked.
“This is the essential mood. Listen, Amanda--”
He stopped short. He looked towards the gangway, they both looked. The
magic word “Breakfast” came simultaneously from them.
“Eggs,” she said ravenously, and led the way.
A smell of coffee as insistent as an herald's trumpet had called a truce
between them.
3
Their marriage had been a comparatively inconspicuous one, but since
that time they had been engaged upon a honeymoon of great extent and
variety. Their wedding had taken place at South Harting church in the
marked absence of Lady Marayne, and it had been marred by only one
untoward event. The Reverend Amos Pugh who, in spite of the earnest
advice of several friends had insisted upon sharing in the ceremony, had
suddenly covered his face with the sleeves of his surplice and fled with
a swift rustle to the vestry, whence an uproar of inadequately smothered
sorrow came as an obligato accompaniment to the more crucial passages
of the service. Amanda appeared unaware of the incident at the time,
but afterwards she explained things to Benham. “Curates,” she said, “are
such pent-up men. One ought, I suppose, to remember that. But he
never had anything to go upon at all--not anything--except his own
imaginations.”
“I suppose when you met him you were nice to him.”
“I was nice to him, of course....”
They drove away from Harting, as it were, over the weeping remains of
this infatuated divine. His sorrow made them thoughtful for a time, and
then Amanda nestled closer to her lover and they forgot about him, and
their honeymoon became so active and entertaining that only very rarely
and transitorily did they ever think of him again.