of anger, what sudden cruelties and amazing tendernesses are buried
and hidden and implied in every love story! What a waste is there of
exquisite things! So each spring sees a million glorious beginnings, a
sunlit heaven in every opening leaf, warm perfection in every stirring
egg, hope and fear and beauty beyond computation in every forest tree;
and in the autumn before the snows come they have all gone, of all
that incalculable abundance of life, of all that hope and adventure,
excitement and deliciousness, there is scarcely more to be found than
a soiled twig, a dirty seed, a dead leaf, black mould or a rotting
feather....
White held the ten or twelve pencilled pages that told how Benham and
Amanda drifted into antagonism and estrangement and as he held it he
thought of the laughter and delight they must have had together, the
exquisite excitements of her eye, the racing colour of her cheek, the
gleams of light upon her skin, the flashes of wit between them, the
sense of discovery, the high rare paths they had followed, the pools in
which they had swum together. And now it was all gone into nothingness,
there was nothing left of it, nothing at all, but just those sheets of
statement, and it may be, stored away in one single mind, like things
forgotten in an attic, a few neglected faded memories....
And even those few sheets of statement were more than most love leaves
behind it. For a time White would not read them. They lay neglected on
his knee as he sat back in Benham's most comfortable chair and enjoyed
an entirely beautiful melancholy.
White too had seen and mourned the spring.
Indeed, poor dear! he had seen and mourned several springs....
With a sigh he took up the manuscript and read Benham's desiccated story
of intellectual estrangement, and how in the end he had decided to
leave his wife and go out alone upon that journey of inquiry he had been
planning when first he met her.
3
Amanda had come back to England in a state of extravagantly vigorous
womanhood. Benham's illness, though it lasted only two or three
weeks, gave her a sense of power and leadership for which she had been
struggling instinctively ever since they came together. For a time at
Locarno he was lax-minded and indolent, and in that time she formed her
bright and limited plans for London. Benham had no plans as yet but
only a sense of divergence, as though he was being pulled in opposite
directions by two irresistible forces. To her it was plain that he
needed occupation, some distinguished occupation, and she could imagine
nothing better for him than a political career. She perceived he had
personality, that he stood out among men so that his very silences were
effective. She loved him immensely, and she had tremendous ambitions for
him and through him.
And also London, the very thought of London, filled her with appetite.
Her soul thirsted for London. It was like some enormous juicy fruit
waiting for her pretty white teeth, a place almost large enough to give
her avidity the sense of enough. She felt it waiting for her, household,
servants, a carriage, shops and the jolly delight of buying and
possessing things, the opera, first-nights, picture exhibitions, great
dinner-parties, brilliant lunch parties, crowds seen from a point
of vantage, the carriage in a long string of fine carriages with the
lamplit multitude peering, Amanda in a thousand bright settings, in a
thousand various dresses. She had had love; it had been glorious, it
was still glorious, but her love-making became now at times almost
perfunctory in the contemplation of these approaching delights and
splendours and excitements.
She knew, indeed, that ideas were at work in Benham's head; but she
was a realist. She did not see why ideas should stand in the way of a
career. Ideas are a brightness, the good looks of the mind. One talks
ideas, but THE THING THAT IS, IS THE THING THAT IS. And though she
believed that Benham had a certain strength of character of his own, she
had that sort of confidence in his love for her and in the power of her
endearments that has in it the assurance of a faint contempt. She had
mingled pride and sense in the glorious realization of the power over
him that her wit and beauty gave her. She had held him faint with her
divinity, intoxicated with the pride of her complete possession, and she
did not dream that the moment when he should see clearly that she could
deliberately use these ultimate delights to rule and influence him,
would be the end of their splendour and her power. Her nature, which
was just a nest of vigorous appetites, was incapable of suspecting his
gathering disillusionment until it burst upon her.
Now with her attention set upon London ahead he could observe her.
In the beginning he had never seemed to be observing her at all, they
dazzled one another; it seemed extraordinary now to him to note how much
he had been able to disregard. There were countless times still when he
would have dropped his observation and resumed that mutual exaltation
very gladly, but always now other things possessed her mind....
There was still an immense pleasure for him in her vigour; there was
something delightful in her pounce, even when she was pouncing on things
superficial, vulgar or destructive. She made him understand and share
the excitement of a big night at the opera, the glitter and prettiness
of a smart restaurant, the clustering little acute adventures of a great
reception of gay people, just as she had already made him understand and
sympathize with dogs. She picked up the art world where he had laid
it down, and she forced him to feel dense and slow before he rebelled
against her multitudinous enthusiasms and admirations. South Harting had
had its little group of artistic people; it is not one of your sleepy
villages, and she slipped back at once into the movement. Those were
the great days of John, the days before the Post Impressionist outbreak.
John, Orpen, Tonks, she bought them with vigour. Artistic circles began
to revolve about her. Very rapidly she was in possession.... And among
other desirable things she had, it seemed, pounced upon and captured
Lady Marayne.
At any rate it was clear that that awful hostile silence and aloofness
was to end. Benham never quite mastered how it was done. But Amanda
had gone in one morning to Desborough Street, very sweetly and
chastely dressed, had abased herself and announced a possible (though
subsequently disproved) grandchild. And she had appreciated the little
lady so highly and openly, she had so instantly caught and reproduced
her tone, that her success, though only temporary in its completeness,
was immediate. In the afternoon Benham was amazed by the apparition of
his mother amidst the scattered unsettled furnishings of the new home
Amanda had chosen in Lancaster Gate. He was in the hall, the door stood
open awaiting packing-cases from a van without. In the open doorway she
shone, looking the smallest of dainty things. There was no effect of her
coming but only of her having arrived there, as a little blue butterfly
will suddenly alight on a flower.
“Well, Poff!” said Lady Marayne, ignoring abysses, “What are you up to
now, Poff? Come and embrace me....”
“No, not so,” she said, “stiffest of sons....”
She laid hold of his ears in the old fashion and kissed one eye.
“Congratulations, dear little Poff. Oh! congratulations! In heaps. I'm
so GLAD.”
Now what was that for?
And then Amanda came out upon the landing upstairs, saw the encounter
with an involuntary cry of joy, and came downstairs with arms wide open.
It was the first intimation he had of their previous meeting. He was for
some minutes a stunned, entirely inadequate Benham....
4
At first Amanda knew nobody in London, except a few people in the
Hampstead Garden suburb that she had not the slightest wish to know, and
then very quickly she seemed to know quite a lot of people. The artistic
circle brought in people, Lady Marayne brought in people; they spread.
It was manifest the Benhams were a very bright young couple; he would
certainly do something considerable presently, and she was bright and
daring, jolly to look at and excellent fun, and, when you came to talk
to her, astonishingly well informed. They passed from one hostess's hand
to another: they reciprocated. The Clynes people and the Rushtones took
her up; Mr. Evesham was amused by her, Lady Beach Mandarin proclaimed
her charm like a trumpet, the Young Liberal people made jealous
advances, Lord Moggeridge found she listened well, she lit one of the
brightest weekend parties Lady Marayne had ever gathered at Chexington.
And her descriptions of recent danger and adventure in Albania not
only entertained her hearers but gave her just that flavour of personal
courage which completes the fascination of a young woman. People in the
gaps of a halting dinner-table conversation would ask: “Have you met
Mrs. Benham?”
Meanwhile Benham appeared to be talking. A smiling and successful young
woman, who a year ago had been nothing more than a leggy girl with a
good lot of miscellaneous reading in her head, and vaguely engaged, or
at least friendly to the pitch of engagement, to Mr. Rathbone-Sanders,
may be forgiven if in the full tide of her success she does not
altogether grasp the intention of her husband's discourse. It seemed to
her that he was obsessed by a responsibility for civilization and the
idea that he was aristocratic. (Secretly she was inclined to doubt
whether he was justified in calling himself aristocratic; at the best
his mother was county-stuff; but still if he did there was no great
harm in it nowadays.) Clearly his line was Tory-Democracy, social reform
through the House of Lords and friendly intimacy with the more spirited
young peers. And it was only very slowly and reluctantly that she
was forced to abandon this satisfactory solution of his problem. She
reproduced all the equipment and comforts of his Finacue Street study in
their new home, she declared constantly that she would rather forego
any old social thing than interfere with his work, she never made him
go anywhere with her without first asking if his work permitted it. To
relieve him of the burthen of such social attentions she even made a fag
or so. The making of fags out of manifestly stricken men, the keeping
of tamed and hopeless admirers, seemed to her to be the most natural and
reasonable of feminine privileges. They did their useful little services
until it pleased the Lord Cheetah to come to his own. That was how she
put it....
But at last he was talking to her in tones that could no longer be
ignored. He was manifestly losing his temper with her. There was a
novel austerity in his voice and a peculiar whiteness about his face on
certain occasions that lingered in her memory.
He was indeed making elaborate explanations. He said that what he wanted
to do was to understand “the collective life of the world,” and that
this was not to be done in a West-End study. He had an extraordinary
contempt, it seemed, for both sides in the drama of British politics. He
had extravagant ideas of beginning in some much more fundamental way.
He wanted to understand this “collective life of the world,” because
ultimately he wanted to help control it. (Was there ever such nonsense?)
The practical side of this was serious enough, however; he was back at
his old idea of going round the earth. Later on that might be rather
a jolly thing to do, but not until they had struck root a little more
surely in London.
And then with amazement, with incredulity, with indignation, she began
to realize that he was proposing to go off by himself upon this vague
extravagant research, that all this work she had been doing to make
a social place for him in London was as nothing to him, that he was
thinking of himself as separable from her....
“But, Cheetah! How can you leave your spotless leopard? You would howl
in the lonely jungle!”
“Possibly I shall. But I am going.”
“Then I shall come.”
“No.” He considered her reasons. “You see you are not interested.”
“But I am.”
“Not as I am. You would turn it all into a jolly holiday. You don't want
to see things as I want to do. You want romance. All the world is a show
for you. As a show I can't endure it. I want to lay hands on it.”
“But, Cheetah!” she said, “this is separation.”
“You will have your life here. And I shall come back.”
“But, Cheetah! How can we be separated?”
“We are separated,” he said.
Her eyes became round with astonishment. Then her face puckered.
“Cheetah!” she cried in a voice of soft distress, “I love you. What do
you mean?”
And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and
shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms....
5
“Don't say we are separated,” she whispered, putting her still wet face
close to his.
“No. We're mates,” he answered softly, with his arm about her.
“How could we ever keep away from each uvver?” she whispered.
He was silent.
“How COULD we?”
He answered aloud. “Amanda,” he said, “I mean to go round the world.”
She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.
“What is to become of me,” she asked suddenly in a voice of despair,
“while you go round the world? If you desert me in London,” she said,
“if you shame me by deserting me in London-- If you leave me, I will
never forgive you, Cheetah! Never.” Then in an almost breathless voice,
and as if she spoke to herself, “Never in all my days.”
6
It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children. There was
nothing involuntary about Amanda. “Soon,” she said, “we must begin to
think of children. Not just now, but a little later. It's good to travel
and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are children in the
background. No woman is really content until she is a mother....” And
for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said about that solitary journey
round the world.
But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk. She set
herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there
were other men in the world. The convenient fags, sometimes a little
embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought into the
light before Benham's eyes. Most of them were much older men than
himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no sane man need
be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a contemporary, Sir
Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood and a suggestion of
Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much in love with Amanda and
of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible difference of manner that
made Benham faintly uneasy. He was ashamed of the feeling. Easton it
seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine honour, so that Amanda could trust
herself with him to an extent that would have been inadvisable with men
of a commoner substance, and he had a gift of understanding and sympathy
that was almost feminine; he could cheer one up when one was lonely and
despondent. For Amanda was so methodical in the arrangement of her time
that even in the full rush of a London season she could find an hour
now and then for being lonely and despondent. And he was a liberal and
understanding purchaser of the ascendant painters; he understood
that side of Amanda's interests, a side upon which Benham was notably
deficient....
“Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?--Sir Philip
Easton?” said Lady Marayne.
Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said
nothing.
“When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her,” said Lady Marayne.
“No,” said Benham after consideration. “I don't intend to be a
wife-herd.”
“What?”
“Wife-herd--same as goat-herd.”
“Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff--nowadays.”
“It's exactly what I mean. I can understand the kind of curator's
interest an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but
to spend my days looking after one person who ought to be able to look
after herself--”
“She's very young.”
“She's quite grown up. Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid.”
“If you leave her about and go abroad--”
“Has she been talking to you, mother?”
“The thing shows.”
“But about my going abroad?”
“She said something, my little Poff.”
Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference
was something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking
inordinately. He weighed his words before he spoke again. “If Amanda
chooses to threaten me with a sort of conditional infidelity, I don't
see that it ought to change the plans I have made for my life....”
7
“No aristocrat has any right to be jealous,” Benham wrote. “If he
chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or
naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel
her to go his way. What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion
through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the
use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no inherent will to
seek and live the aristocratic life?
“But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call....”
He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation.
Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of her,
the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly
resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of thinking her
over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been
preoccupied with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a
sense of extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her,
of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone
conclusions. He was ready now even with the details of his project. She
should go on with her life in London exactly as she had planned it. He
would take fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might
spend without check or stint as it pleased her. He was going round the
world for one or two years. It was even possible he would not go alone.
There was a man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don
called Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out
his ideas....
To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should
happen.
She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily
told her that this only hardened his heart. She perceived that she must
make a softer appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive and
imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the
first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to
bear a child. “He cannot go if I am going to have a child,” she told
herself. But that would mean illness, and for illness in herself or
others Amanda had the intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet even
illness would be better than this intolerable publication of her
husband's ability to leave her side....
She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith
to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him. Her
dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.
“Yes,” he said, “I want to have children, but I must go round the world
none the less.”
She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind. She
argued with persistence and repetition. And then suddenly so that she
was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.
She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and she
was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-forgetful;
she was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale green, that set off
her slim erect body and the strong clear lines of her neck and shoulders
very beautifully, some greenish stones caught a light from without and
flashed soft whispering gleams from amidst the misty darkness of her
hair. She was going to Lady Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for
a dinner at the House with some young Liberals at which he was to meet
two representative Indians with a grievance from Bengal. Husband and
wife had but a few moments together. She asked about his company and he
told her.
“They will tell you about India.”
“Yes.”
She stood for a moment looking out across the lights and the dark green
trees, and then she turned to him.
“Why cannot I come with you?” she asked with sudden passion. “Why cannot
I see the things you want to see?”
“I tell you you are not interested. You would only be interested through
me. That would not help me. I should just be dealing out my premature
ideas to you. If you cared as I care, if you wanted to know as I want to
know, it would be different. But you don't. It isn't your fault that
you don't. It happens so. And there is no good in forced interest, in
prescribed discovery.”
“Cheetah,” she asked, “what is it that you want to know--that I don't
care for?”
“I want to know about the world. I want to rule the world.”
“So do I.”
“No, you want to have the world.”
“Isn't it the same?”
“No. You're a greedier thing than I am, you Black Leopard you--standing
there in the dusk. You're a stronger thing. Don't you know you're
stronger? When I am with you, you carry your point, because you are more
concentrated, more definite, less scrupulous. When you run beside me
you push me out of my path.... You've made me afraid of you.... And so
I won't go with you, Leopard. I go alone. It isn't because I don't love
you. I love you too well. It isn't because you aren't beautiful and
wonderful....”
“But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for this that you want than
you care for me.”
Benham thought of it. “I suppose I do,” he said.
“What is it that you want? Still I don't understand.”
Her voice had the break of one who would keep reasonable in spite of
pain.
“I ought to tell you.”
“Yes, you ought to tell me.”
“I wonder if I can tell you,” he said very thoughtfully, and rested his
hands on his hips. “I shall seem ridiculous to you.”
“You ought to tell me.”
“I think what I want is to be king of the world.”
She stood quite still staring at him.
“I do not know how I can tell you of it. Amanda, do you remember those
bodies--you saw those bodies--those mutilated men?”
“I saw them,” said Amanda.
“Well. Is it nothing to you that those things happen?”
“They must happen.”
“No. They happen because there are no kings but pitiful kings. They
happen because the kings love their Amandas and do not care.”
“But what can YOU do, Cheetah?”
“Very little. But I can give my life and all my strength. I can give all
I can give.”
“But how? How can you help it--help things like that massacre?”
“I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong with my world and rule it
and set it right.”
“YOU! Alone.”