village feuds and above all that great feud religion. In Albania there
is only one religion and that is hate. But there are three churches for
the better cultivation of hate and cruelty, the Latin, the Greek and the
Mahometan.”
“But no one has ever conquered these people.”
“Any one could, the Servians, the Bulgarians, the Greeks, the Italians,
the Austrians. Why, they can't even shoot! It's just the balance of
power and all that foolery keeps this country a roadless wilderness.
Good God, how I tire of it! These men who swagger and stink, their
brawling dogs, their greasy priests and dervishes, the down-at-heel
soldiers, the bribery and robbery, the cheating over the money....”
He slipped off the parapet, too impatient to sit any longer, and began
to pace up and down in the road.
“One marvels that no one comes to clear up this country, one itches to
be at the job, and then one realizes that before one can begin here, one
must get to work back there, where the fools and pedants of WELT POLITIK
scheme mischief one against another. This country frets me. I can't see
any fun in it, can't see the humour of it. And the people away there
know no better than to play off tribe against tribe, sect against sect,
one peasant prejudice against another. Over this pass the foolery grows
grimmer and viler. We shall come to where the Servian plots against
the Bulgarian and the Greek against both, and the Turk, with spasmodic
massacres and indulgences, broods over the brew. Every division is
subdivided. There are two sorts of Greek church, Exarchic, Patriarchic,
both teaching by threat and massacre. And there is no one, no one, with
the sense to over-ride all these squalid hostilities. All those fools
away there in London and Vienna and St. Petersburg and Rome take sides
as though these beastly tribes and leagues and superstitions meant
anything but blank, black, damnable ignorance. One fool stands up for
the Catholic Albanians, another finds heroes in the Servians, another
talks of Brave Little Montenegro, or the Sturdy Bulgarian, or the Heroic
Turk. There isn't a religion in the whole Balkan peninsula, there isn't
a tribal or national sentiment that deserves a moment's respect from
a sane man. They're things like niggers' nose-rings and Chinese secret
societies; childish things, idiot things that have to go. Yet there is
no one who will preach the only possible peace, which is the peace of
the world-state, the open conspiracy of all the sane men in the world
against the things that break us up into wars and futilities. And here
am I--who have the light--WANDERING! Just wandering!”
He shrugged his shoulders and came to stare at the torrent under the
bridge.
“You're getting ripe for London, Cheetah,” said Amanda softly.
“I want somehow to get to work, to get my hands on definite things.”
“How can we get back?”
She had to repeat her question presently.
“We can go on. Over the hills is Ochrida and then over another pass is
Presba, and from there we go down into Monastir and reach a railway and
get back to the world of our own times again.”
8
But before they reached the world of their own times Macedonia was to
show them something grimmer than Albania.
They were riding through a sunlit walnut wood beyond Ochrida when they
came upon the thing.
The first they saw of it looked like a man lying asleep on a grassy
bank. But he lay very still indeed, he did not look up, he did not stir
as they passed, the pose of his hand was stiff, and when Benham glanced
back at him, he stifled a little cry of horror. For this man had no face
and the flies had been busy upon him....
Benham caught Amanda's bridle so that she had to give her attention to
her steed.
“Ahead!” he said, “Ahead! Look, a village!”
(Why the devil didn't they bury the man? Why? And that fool Giorgio and
the others were pulling up and beginning to chatter. After all she might
look back.)
Through the trees now they could see houses. He quickened his pace and
jerked Amanda's horse forward....
But the village was a still one. Not a dog barked.
Here was an incredible village without even a dog!
And then, then they saw some more people lying about. A woman lay in
a doorway. Near her was something muddy that might have been a child,
beyond were six men all spread out very neatly in a row with their faces
to the sky.
“Cheetah!” cried Amanda, with her voice going up. “They've been killed.
Some one has killed them.”
Benham halted beside her and stared stupidly. “It's a band,” he said.
“It's--propaganda. Greeks or Turks or Bulgarians.”
“But their feet and hands are fastened! And--... WHAT HAVE THEY BEEN
DOING TO THEM?...”
“I want to kill,” cried Benham. “Oh! I want to kill people. Come on,
Amanda! It blisters one's eyes. Come away. Come away! Come!”
Her face was white and her eyes terror-stricken. She obeyed him
mechanically. She gave one last look at those bodies....
Down the deep-rutted soil of the village street they clattered. They
came to houses that had been set on fire....
“What is that hanging from a tree?” cried Amanda. “Oh, oh!”
“Come on....”
Behind them rode the others scared and hurrying.
The sunlight had become the light of hell. There was no air but horror.
Across Benham's skies these fly-blown trophies of devilry dangled
mockingly in the place of God. He had no thought but to get away.
Presently they encountered a detachment of Turkish soldiers, very greasy
and ragged, with worn-out boots and yellow faces, toiling up the stony
road belatedly to the village. Amanda and Benham riding one behind
the other in a stricken silence passed this labouring column without a
gesture, but presently they heard the commander stopping and questioning
Giorgio....
Then Giorgio and the others came clattering to overtake them.
Giorgio was too full to wait for questions. He talked eagerly to
Benham's silence.
It must have happened yesterday, he explained. They were
Bulgarians--traitors. They had been converted to the Patriarchists by
the Greeks--by a Greek band, that is to say. They had betrayed one
of their own people. Now a Bulgarian band had descended upon
them. Bulgarian bands it seemed were always particularly rough on
Bulgarian-speaking Patriarchists....
9
That night they slept in a dirty little room in a peasant's house in
Resnia, and in the middle of the night Amanda woke up with a start and
heard Benham talking. He seemed to be sitting up as he talked. But he
was not talking to her and his voice sounded strange.
“Flies,” he said, “in the sunlight!”
He was silent for a time and then he repeated the same words.
Then suddenly he began to declaim. “Oh! Brutes together. Apes. Apes with
knives. Have they no lord, no master, to save them from such things?
This is the life of men when no man rules.... When no man rules.... Not
even himself.... It is because we are idle, because we keep our wits
slack and our wills weak that these poor devils live in hell. These
things happen here and everywhere when the hand that rules grows
weak. Away in China now they are happening. Persia. Africa.... Russia
staggers. And I who should serve the law, I who should keep order,
wander and make love.... My God! may I never forget! May I never forget!
Flies in the sunlight! That man's face. And those six men!
“Grip the savage by the throat.
“The weak savage in the foreign office, the weak savage at the party
headquarters, feud and indolence and folly. It is all one world. This
and that are all one thing. The spites of London and the mutilations
of Macedonia. The maggots that eat men's faces and the maggots that rot
their minds. Rot their minds. Rot their minds. Rot their minds....”
To Amanda it sounded like delirium.
“CHEETAH!” she said suddenly between remonstrance and a cry of terror.
The darkness suddenly became quite still. He did not move.
She was afraid. “Cheetah!” she said again.
“What is it, Amanda?”
“I thought--. Are you all right?”
“Quite.”
“But do you feel well?”
“I've got this cold I caught in Ochrida. I suppose I'm feverish.
But--yes, I'm well.”
“You were talking.”
Silence for a time.
“I was thinking,” he said.
“You talked.”
“I'm sorry,” he said after another long pause.
10
The next morning Benham had a pink spot on either cheek, his eyes were
feverishly bright, he would touch no food and instead of coffee he
wanted water. “In Monastir there will be a doctor,” he said. “Monastir
is a big place. In Monastir I will see a doctor. I want a doctor.”
They rode out of the village in the freshness before sunrise and up long
hills, and sometimes they went in the shade of woods and sometimes in
a flooding sunshine. Benham now rode in front, preoccupied, intent,
regardless of Amanda, a stranger, and she rode close behind him
wondering.
“When you get to Monastir, young man,” she told him, inaudibly, “you
will go straight to bed and we'll see what has to be done with you.”
“AMMALATO,” said Giorgio confidentially, coming abreast of her.
“MEDICO IN MONASTIR,” said Amanda.
“SI,--MOLTI MEDICI, MONASTIR,” Giorgio agreed.
Then came the inevitable dogs, big white brutes, three in full cry
charging hard at Benham and a younger less enterprising beast running
along the high bank above yapping and making feints to descend.
The goatherd, reclining under the shadow of a rock, awaited Benham's
embarrassment with an indolent malice.
“You UNCIVILIZED Beasts!” cried Benham, and before Amanda could realize
what he was up to, she heard the crack of his revolver and saw a puff
of blue smoke drift away above his right shoulder. The foremost beast
rolled over and the goatherd had sprung to his feet. He shouted with
something between anger and dismay as Benham, regardless of the fact
that the other dogs had turned and were running back, let fly a second
time. Then the goatherd had clutched at the gun that lay on the grass
near at hand, Giorgio was bawling in noisy remonstrance and also getting
ready to shoot, and the horse-owner and his boy were clattering back
to a position of neutrality up the stony road. “BANG!” came a flight
of lead within a yard of Benham, and then the goatherd was in retreat
behind a rock and Giorgio was shouting “AVANTI, AVANTI!” to Amanda.
She grasped his intention and in another moment she had Benham's horse
by the bridle and was leading the retreat. Giorgio followed close,
driving the two baggage mules before him.
“I am tired of dogs,” Benham said. “Tired to death of dogs. All savage
dogs must be shot. All through the world. I am tired--”
Their road carried them down through the rocky pass and then up a long
slope in the open. Far away on the left they saw the goatherd running
and shouting and other armed goatherds appearing among the rocks. Behind
them the horse-owner and his boy came riding headlong across the zone of
danger.
“Dogs must be shot,” said Benham, exalted. “Dogs must be shot.”
“Unless they are GOOD dogs,” said Amanda, keeping beside him with an eye
on his revolver.
“Unless they are good dogs to every one,” said Benham.
They rushed along the road in a turbulent dusty huddle of horses and
mules and riders. The horse-owner, voluble in Albanian, was trying
to get past them. His boy pressed behind him. Giorgio in the rear had
unslung his rifle and got it across the front of his saddle. Far
away they heard the sound of a shot, and a kind of shudder in the air
overhead witnessed to the flight of the bullet. They crested a rise and
suddenly between the tree boughs Monastir was in view, a wide stretch of
white town, with many cypress and plane trees, a winding river with many
wooden bridges, clustering minarets of pink and white, a hilly cemetery,
and scattered patches of soldiers' tents like some queer white crop to
supplement its extensive barracks.
As they hurried down towards this city of refuge a long string of mules
burthened with great bales of green stuff appeared upon a convergent
track to the left. Besides the customary muleteers there were, by way of
an escort, a couple of tattered Turkish soldiers. All these men watched
the headlong approach of Benham's party with apprehensive inquiry.
Giorgio shouted some sort of information that made the soldiers brighten
up and stare up the hill, and set the muleteers whacking and shouting at
their convoy. It struck Amanda that Giorgio must be telling lies about
a Bulgarian band. In another moment Benham and Amanda found themselves
swimming in a torrent of mules. Presently they overtook a small flock of
fortunately nimble sheep, and picked up several dogs, dogs that happily
disregarded Benham in the general confusion. They also comprehended a
small springless cart, two old women with bundles and an elderly Greek
priest, before their dusty, barking, shouting cavalcade reached the
outskirts of Monastir. The two soldiers had halted behind to cover the
retreat.
Benham's ghastly face was now bedewed with sweat and he swayed in his
saddle as he rode. “This is NOT civilization, Amanda,” he said, “this is
NOT civilization.”
And then suddenly with extraordinary pathos:
“Oh! I want to go to BED! I want to go to BED! A bed with sheets....”
To ride into Monastir is to ride into a maze. The streets go nowhere in
particular. At least that was the effect on Amanda and Benham. It was
as if Monastir too had a temperature and was slightly delirious. But at
last they found an hotel--quite a civilized hotel....
The doctor in Monastir was an Armenian with an ambition that outran his
capacity to speak English. He had evidently studied the language chiefly
from books. He thought THESE was pronounced “theser” and THOSE was
pronounced “thoser,” and that every English sentence should be taken at
a rush. He diagnosed Benham's complaint in various languages and failed
to make his meaning clear to Amanda. One combination of words he clung
to obstinately, having clearly the utmost faith in its expressiveness.
To Amanda it sounded like, “May, Ah! Slays,” and it seemed to her that
he sought to intimate a probable fatal termination of Benham's fever.
But it was clear that the doctor was not satisfied that she understood.
He came again with a queer little worn book, a parallel vocabulary of
half-a-dozen European languages.
He turned over the pages and pointed to a word. “May! Ah! Slays!” he
repeated, reproachfully, almost bitterly.
“Oh, MEASLES!” cried Amanda....
So the spirited honeymoon passed its zenith.
11
The Benhams went as soon as possible down to Smyrna and thence by way
of Uskub tortuously back to Italy. They recuperated at the best hotel
of Locarno in golden November weather, and just before Christmas they
turned their faces back to England.
Benham's plans were comprehensive but entirely vague; Amanda had not so
much plans as intentions....
CHAPTER THE FIFTH ~~ THE ASSIZE OF JEALOUSY
1
It was very manifest in the disorder of papers amidst which White spent
so many evenings of interested perplexity before this novel began to be
written that Benham had never made any systematic attempt at editing
or revising his accumulation at all. There were not only overlapping
documents, in which he had returned again to old ideas and restated
them in the light of fresh facts and an apparent unconsciousness of his
earlier effort, but there were mutually destructive papers, new views
quite ousting the old had been tossed in upon the old, and the very
definition of the second limitation, as it had first presented itself to
the writer, had been abandoned. To begin with, this second division
had been labelled “Sex,” in places the heading remained, no
effective substitute had been chosen for some time, but there was
a closely-written memorandum, very much erased and written over and
amended, which showed Benham's early dissatisfaction with that crude
rendering of what he had in mind. This memorandum was tacked to an
interrupted fragment of autobiography, a manuscript soliloquy in which
Benham had been discussing his married life.
“It was not until I had been married for the better part of a year, and
had spent more than six months in London, that I faced the plain issue
between the aims I had set before myself and the claims and immediate
necessities of my personal life. For all that time I struggled not so
much to reconcile them as to serve them simultaneously....”
At that the autobiography stopped short, and the intercalary note began.
This intercalary note ran as follows:
“I suppose a mind of my sort cannot help but tend towards
simplification, towards making all life turn upon some one dominant
idea, complex perhaps in its reality but reducible at last to one
consistent simple statement, a dominant idea which is essential as
nothing else is essential, which makes and sustains and justifies. This
is perhaps the innate disposition of the human mind, at least of the
European mind--for I have some doubts about the Chinese. Theology
drives obstinately towards an ultimate unity in God, science towards
an ultimate unity in law, towards a fundamental element and a universal
material truth from which all material truths evolve, and in matters of
conduct there is the same tendency to refer to a universal moral law.
Now this may be a simplification due to the need of the human mind to
comprehend, and its inability to do so until the load is lightened by
neglecting factors. William James has suggested that on account of this,
theology may be obstinately working away from the truth, that the truth
may be that there are several or many in compatible and incommensurable
gods; science, in the same search for unity, may follow divergent
methods of inquiry into ultimately uninterchangeable generalizations;
and there may be not only not one universal moral law, but no effective
reconciliation of the various rights and duties of a single individual.
At any rate I find myself doubtful to this day about my own personal
systems of right and wrong. I can never get all my life into one focus.
It is exactly like examining a rather thick section with a microscope of
small penetration; sometimes one level is clear and the rest foggy and
monstrous, and sometimes another.
“Now the ruling ME, I do not doubt, is the man who has set his face
to this research after aristocracy, and from the standpoint of this
research it is my duty to subordinate all other considerations to
this work of clearing up the conception of rule and nobility in human
affairs. This is my aristocratic self. What I did not grasp for a long
time, and which now grows clearer and clearer to me, is firstly that
this aristocratic self is not the whole of me, it has absolutely nothing
to do with a pain in my ear or in my heart, with a scar on my hand or my
memory, and secondly that it is not altogether mine. Whatever knowledge
I have of the quality of science, whatever will I have towards right,
is of it; but if from without, from the reasoning or demonstration or
reproof of some one else, there comes to me clear knowledge, clarified
will, that also is as it were a part of my aristocratic self coming
home to me from the outside. How often have I not found my own mind
in Prothero after I have failed to find it in myself? It is, to be
paradoxical, my impersonal personality, this Being that I have in common
with all scientific-spirited and aristocratic-spirited men. This it is
that I am trying to get clear from the great limitations of humanity.
When I assert a truth for the sake of truth to my own discomfort or
injury, there again is this incompatibility of the aristocratic self and
the accepted, confused, conglomerate self of the unanalyzed man. The two
have a separate system of obligations. One's affections, compounded
as they are in the strangest way of physical reactions and emotional
associations, one's implicit pledges to particular people, one's
involuntary reactions, one's pride and jealousy, all that one might call
the dramatic side of one's life, may be in conflict with the definitely
seen rightnesses of one's higher use....”
The writing changed at this point.
“All this seems to me at once as old as the hills and too new to be
true. This is like the conflict of the Superior Man of Confucius to
control himself, it is like the Christian battle of the spirit with the
flesh, it savours of that eternal wrangle between the general and the
particular which is metaphysics, it was for this aristocratic self, for
righteousness' sake, that men have hungered and thirsted, and on this
point men have left father and mother and child and wife and followed
after salvation. This world-wide, ever-returning antagonism has filled
the world in every age with hermits and lamas, recluses and teachers,
devoted and segregated lives. It is a perpetual effort to get above the
simplicity of barbarism. Whenever men have emerged from the primitive
barbarism of the farm and the tribe, then straightway there has emerged
this conception of a specialized life a little lifted off the earth;
often, for the sake of freedom, celibate, usually disciplined, sometimes
directed, having a generalized aim, beyond personal successes and bodily
desires. So it is that the philosopher, the scientifically concentrated
man, has appeared, often, I admit, quite ridiculously at first, setting
out upon the long journey that will end only when the philosopher is
king....
“At first I called my Second Limitation, Sex. But from the outset I
meant more than mere sexual desire, lust and lustful imaginings, more
than personal reactions to beauty and spirited living, more even than
what is called love. On the one hand I had in mind many appetites that
are not sexual yet turn to bodily pleasure, and on the other there are
elements of pride arising out of sex and passing into other regions,
all the elements of rivalry for example, that have strained my first
definition to the utmost. And I see now that this Second Limitation as I
first imagined it spreads out without any definite boundary, to include
one's rivalries with old schoolfellows, for example, one's generosities
to beggars and dependents, one's desire to avenge an injured friend,
one's point of honour, one's regard for the good opinion of an aunt and
one's concern for the health of a pet cat. All these things may enrich,
but they may also impede and limit the aristocratic scheme. I thought
for a time I would call this ill-defined and miscellaneous wilderness of
limitation the Personal Life. But at last I have decided to divide this
vast territory of difficulties into two subdivisions and make one of
these Indulgence, meaning thereby pleasurable indulgence of sense or
feeling, and the other a great mass of self-regarding motives that
will go with a little stretching under the heading of Jealousy. I
admit motives are continually playing across the boundary of these
two divisions, I should find it difficult to argue a case for my
classification, but in practice these two groupings have a quite
definite meaning for me. There is pride in the latter group of impulses
and not in the former; the former are always a little apologetic. Fear,
Indulgence, Jealousy, these are the First Three Limitations of the soul
of man. And the greatest of these is Jealousy, because it can use pride.
Over them the Life Aristocratic, as I conceive it, marches to its end.
It saves itself for the truth rather than sacrifices itself romantically
for a friend. It justifies vivisection if thereby knowledge is won for
ever. It upholds that Brutus who killed his sons. It forbids devotion to
women, courts of love and all such decay of the chivalrous idea. And it
resigns--so many things that no common Man of Spirit will resign. Its
intention transcends these things. Over all the world it would maintain
justice, order, a noble peace, and it would do this without indignation,
without resentment, without mawkish tenderness or individualized
enthusiasm or any queen of beauty. It is of a cold austere quality,
commanding sometimes admiration but having small hold upon the
affections of men. So that it is among its foremost distinctions that
its heart is steeled....”
There this odd fragment ended and White was left to resume the
interrupted autobiography.
2