see--... In this world one may wake in the night and one may resolve to
be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king. Does that sound
foolishness to you? Anyhow, it's fair that I should tell you, though
you count me a fool. This--this kingship--this dream of the night--is
my life. It is the very core of me. Much more than you are. More than
anything else can be. I mean to be a king in this earth. KING. I'm not
mad.... I see the world staggering from misery to misery and there is
little wisdom, less rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things
come by chance and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my
world and I am responsible. Every man to whom this light has come
is responsible. As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your
kingship is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no delight,
except in work, in service, in utmost effort. As far as I can do it I
will rule my world. I cannot abide in this smug city, I cannot
endure its self-complacency, its routine, its gloss of success, its
rottenness.... I shall do little, perhaps I shall do nothing, but what I
can understand and what I can do I will do. Think of that wild beautiful
country we saw, and the mean misery, the filth and the warring cruelty
of the life that lives there, tragedy, tragedy without dignity; and
think, too, of the limitless ugliness here, and of Russia slipping
from disorder to massacre, and China, that sea of human beings,
sliding steadily to disaster. Do you think these are only things in the
newspapers? To me at any rate they are not things in newspapers; they
are pain and failure, they are torment, they are blood and dust and
misery. They haunt me day and night. Even if it is utterly absurd I will
still do my utmost. It IS absurd. I'm a madman and you and my mother
are sensible people.... And I will go my way.... I don't care for the
absurdity. I don't care a rap.”
He stopped abruptly.
“There you have it, Amanda. It's rant, perhaps. Sometimes I feel it's
rant. And yet it's the breath of life to me.... There you are.... At
last I've been able to break silence and tell you....”
He stopped with something like a sob and stood regarding the dusky
mystery of her face. She stood quite still, she was just a beautiful
outline in the twilight, her face was an indistinctness under the black
shadow of her hair, with eyes that were two patches of darkness.
He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the time.
His voice changed. “Well--if you provoke a man enough, you see he makes
speeches. Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda. Here we are talking instead
of going to our dinners. The car has been waiting ten minutes.”
Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas....
A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly. In an instant she
had ceased to plot against him. A vast wave of emotion swept her forward
to a resolution that astonished her.
“Cheetah!” she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed,
“give me one thing. Stay until June with me.”
“Why?” he asked.
Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.
“Because--now--no, I don't want to keep you any more--I am not trying to
hold you any more.... I want....”
She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.
“Cheetah,” she whispered almost inaudibly, “Cheetah--I didn't
understand. But now--. I want to bear your child.”
He was astonished. “Old Leopard!” he said.
“No,” she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing
very close to him, “Queen---if I can be--to your King.”
“You want to bear me a child!” he whispered, profoundly moved.
8
The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of Commons
came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer. And over against
Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of those men who
know that their judgments are quoted.
“Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?” he asked of
his neighbour in confidential undertones....
He tittered. “I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY aware
that the man to her left is talking to her....”
9
A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was now a
fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer....
All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in
some way Prothero was necessary to his mind. It was as if he looked to
Prothero to keep him real. He suspected even while he obeyed that upward
flourish which was his own essential characteristic. He had a peculiar
feeling that somehow that upward bias would betray him; that from
exaltation he might presently float off, into the higher, the better,
and so to complete unreality. He fled from priggishness and the terror
of such sublimity alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation to so many
things Prothero in a peculiar distinctive manner SAW. He had less
self-control than Benham, less integrity of purpose, less concentration,
and things that were before his eyes were by the very virtue of these
defects invariably visible to him. Things were able to insist upon
themselves with him. Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted
his purpose too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them. He
repudiated inconvenient facts. He mastered and made his world; Prothero
accepted and recorded his. Benham was a will towards the universe where
Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive activity.
And it was because of his realization of this profound difference
between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking Prothero with
him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision--rather like that
eye the Graiae used to hand one another....
After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms in
Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue
sky, seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholarship pervaded them--a
little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not
completely forgotten. Prothero's door had been locked against the world,
and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only
apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better
part of a second. He might have been asleep, he might have been doing
anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men
exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before
Benham' s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host
to the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects
of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the
distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red,
incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an
air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE, its cover
proclaimed....
His host followed that glance and blushed. “They send me all sorts of
inappropriate stuff to review,” he remarked.
And then he was denouncing celibacy.
The transition wasn't very clear to Benham. His mind had been
preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project.
Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between his
teeth and bolted. He began to say the most shocking things right away,
so that Benham's attention was caught in spite of himself.
“Inflammatory classics.”
“What's that?”
“Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me,” said Prothero. “I can't
stand it any longer.”
It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world,
such a statement might have been credible. Even in his own life,--it was
now indeed a remote, forgotten stage--there had been something distantly
akin....
“You're going to marry?”
“I must.”
“Who's the lady, Billy?”
“I don't know. Venus.”
His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly. “So far as I know,
it is Venus Anadyomene.” A flash of laughter passed across his face
and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. “I like her
best, anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! I feel that almost any of them--”
“Tut, tut!” said Benham.
Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.
“Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face? I
am not pronouncing an immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. I
am telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I feel. I want--Venus.
I don't want her to talk to or anything of that sort.... I have been
studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning,
instead of doing any work. Would you like to see it?... NO!...
“This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad. It is a peculiarly
erotic spring. I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend
to ordinary conversation. These feelings, I understand, are by no means
peculiar to myself.... No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now
that the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in you said, 'How
are you?' I am telling you how I am. You brought it on yourself. Well--I
am--inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious convictions to assist
me either to endure or deny this--this urgency. And so why should I deny
it? It's one of our chief problems here. The majority of my fellow
dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and
combination-room are in just the same case as myself. The fever in
oneself detects the fever in others. I know their hidden thoughts. Their
fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts. Each covers his
miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference. A
tattered cloak.... Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible
vice of continence--”
“Billy, what's the matter with you?”
Prothero grimaced impatience. “Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a
humbug, Benham?” he screamed, and in screaming became calmer. “Nature
taunts me, maddens me. My life is becoming a hell of shame. 'Get out
from all these books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.' The Flesh,
Benham. Yes--I insist--the Flesh. Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any
man a pure spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage,
with too much port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked
Aspasia.”
“Mutual, perhaps, Billy.”
“Oh! you can sneer!”
“Well, clearly--Saint Paul is my authority--it's marriage, Billy.”
Prothero had walked to the window. He turned round.
“I CAN'T marry,” he said. “The trouble has gone too far. I've lost my
nerve in the presence of women. I don't like them any more. They come
at one--done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about
all sorts of things that don't matter....” He surveyed his friend's
thoughtful attitude. “I'm getting to hate women, Benham. I'm beginning
now to understand the bitterness of spinsters against men. I'm beginning
to grasp the unkindliness of priests. The perpetual denial. To you,
happily married, a woman is just a human being. You can talk to her,
like her, you can even admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge
against her....”
He sat down abruptly.
Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered him.
“Billy! this is delusion,” he said. “What's come over you?”
“I'm telling you,” said Prothero.
“No,” said Benham.
Prothero awaited some further utterance.
“I'm looking for the cause of it. It's feeding, Billy. It's port and
stimulants where there is no scope for action. It's idleness. I begin to
see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser.”
“Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers. Look at that filing
system like an arsenal of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow
not idleness.”
“There's still bodily idleness. No. That's your trouble. You're stuffy.
You've enlarged your liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning after
an extravagant breakfast--. And peep and covet.”
“Just eggs and bacon!”
“Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. Come out of it, Billy,
and get aired.”
“How can one?”
“Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!”
“It's an infernally warm morning.
“Walk with me to Grantchester.”
“We might go by boat. You could row.”
“WALK.”
“I ought to do these papers.”
“You weren't doing them.”
“No....”
“Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours
is--horrid--and just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come
with me to Russia and about the world. I'm going to leave my wife--”
“Leave your wife!”
“Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead
you are in this disgusting state. I've never met anything in my life so
hot and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one
talk to you?”
10
“You pull things down to your own level,” said Benham as they went
through the heat to Grantchester.
“I pull them down to truth,” panted Prothero.
“Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and
discipline and training some sort of falsity!”
“Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride.”
For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....
The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the
background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
“I'm not talking of Love,” he said, remaining persistently outrageous.
“I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of
arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is
physically possible....
“But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?”
“Then why don't we up and find out?” said Billy.
He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that
surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came
to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our
indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with
awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in
particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to
traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? “What is the wisdom
of the ages?” said Prothero. “Think of the corners where that wisdom was
born.... Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise
man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab
epileptic....”
“Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?” protested Benham.
The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter
experience. Most of it was better forgotten. It didn't convince. It had
never worked things out. In this matter just as in every other matter
that really signified things had still to be worked out. Nothing had
been worked out hitherto. The wisdom of the ages was a Cant. People had
been too busy quarrelling, fighting and running away. There wasn't
any digested experience of the ages at all. Only the mis-remembered
hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man.
“Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or
isn't it?” Prothero demanded. “There's a simple question enough, and is
there anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages to tell
me yes or no? Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and vigorous as a
mated man? Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being? Can she
be? I don't believe so. Then why in thunder do we let her be? Here am I
at a centre of learning and wisdom and I don't believe so; and there is
nothing in all our colleges, libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here,
to settle that plain question for me, plainly and finally. My life is a
grubby torment of cravings because it isn't settled. If sexual activity
IS a part of the balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set
about making it accessible and harmless and have done with it. Swedish
exercises. That sort of thing. If it isn't, if it can be reduced and
done without, then let us set about teaching people HOW to control
themselves and reduce and get rid of this vehement passion. But all this
muffled mystery, this pompous sneak's way we take with it!”
“But, Billy! How can one settle these things? It's a matter of
idiosyncrasy. What is true for one man isn't true for another. There's
infinite difference of temperaments!”
“Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral code
for each sort? Why am I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for
Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like a glove? It isn't
convenient for me. It fits me like a hair-shirt. Of course there
are temperaments, but why can't we formulate them and exercise the
elementary charity of recognizing that one man's health in these matters
is another man's death? Some want love and gratification and some don't.
There are people who want children and people who don't want to be
bothered by children but who are full of vivid desires. There are
people whose only happiness is chastity, and women who would rather
be courtesans than mothers. Some of us would concentrate upon a
single passion or a single idea; others overflow with a
miscellaneous--tenderness. Yes,--and you smile! Why spit upon and insult
a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin at it? Why try every one
by the standards that suit oneself? We're savages, Benham, shamefaced
savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting.
“I was angry about sex by seventeen,” he went on. “Every year I live I
grow angrier.”
His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
“Think,” he said, “of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex
that is going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these
thousands full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it
together; we work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and
casual stories, patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders,
disease, trouble, escapes; and the next generation will start, and the
next generation after that will start with nothing but your wisdom of
the ages, which isn't wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos
and mystery and the secretive cunning of the savage....
“What I really want to do is my work,” said Prothero, going off quite
unexpectedly again. “That is why all this business, this incessant
craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry....”
11
“There I'm with you,” cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent
of Prothero's prepossessions. “What we want to do is our work.”
He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting
the word again.
“It's this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--living
the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of
this business. If it was only submission.... YOU think it is only
submission--giving way.... It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all
right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't
know all the time that there was something else to live for,
something far more important. And different. Absolutely different
and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these
considerations. It won't fit in.... I don't know what this other thing
is; it's what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS, in
all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands control, it demands continence,
it insists upon disregard.”
But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to
Prothero that day.
“Mankind,” said Benham, “is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates
us. It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent
necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as
being married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love
story....”
“Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied,” said Prothero,
sticking stoutly to his own view.
12
It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester
after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and
recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the
imagination of Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero's
troubles as soar over them. It is the last triumph of the human
understanding to sympathize with desires we do not share, and to Benham
who now believed himself to be loved beyond the chances of life, who
was satisfied and tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible
that Prothero's demands should seem anything more than the grotesque and
squalid squealings of the beast that has to be overridden and rejected
altogether. It is a freakish fact of our composition that these most
intense feelings in life are just those that are most rapidly and
completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years, but the magic
of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives and
vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was still not
a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale,
and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its
sty....
What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at last he
could sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the project
that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.
He had discovered a new reason for travelling. The last country we can
see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country. It is as hard to see
one's own country as it is to see the back of one's head. It is too
much behind us, too much ourselves. But Russia is like England with
everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked
about St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage
untamed London on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal
cities, like no other capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings
mingled in their effects. Like London it looked over the heads of
its own people to a limitless polyglot empire. And Russia was an
aristocratic land, with a middle-class that had no pride in itself as a
class; it had a British toughness and incompetence, a British disregard
of logic and meticulous care. Russia, like England, was outside Catholic
Christendom, it had a state church and the opposition to that church was
not secularism but dissent. One could draw a score of such contrasted
parallels. And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid
bare the elemental facts of a great social organization. It was having
its South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a
certain defeat instead of a dubious victory....
“There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in
England,” said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.
Benham went on with his discourse about Russia....
“At the college of Troitzka,” said Prothero, “which I understand is a
kind of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me
that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the
arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are
conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality.”
Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.
He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation.
He led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try
to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty
of every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much. And so he
was going, and if Prothero cared to come too--
“Yes,” said Prothero, “I should like to go to Russia.”
13
But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was never
able to lift Prothero away from his obsession. It was the substance of
their talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting destroyers and
winking beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the smoothly undulating
darkness of the North Sea; it rose upon them again as they sat over
the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in the express for Berlin.
Prothero filled the Sieges Allee with his complaints against nature
and society, and distracted Benham in his contemplation of Polish
agriculture from the windows of the train with turgid sexual liberalism.
So that Benham, during this period until Prothero left him and until
the tragic enormous spectacle of Russia in revolution took complete
possession of him, was as it were thinking upon two floors. Upon the one
he was thinking of the vast problems of a society of a hundred million
people staggering on the verge of anarchy, and upon the other he was
perplexed by the feverish inattention of Prothero to the tremendous
things that were going on all about them. It was only presently when the
serenity of his own private life began to be ruffled by disillusionment,
that he began to realize the intimate connexion of these two systems of
thought. Yet Prothero put it to him plainly enough.
“Inattentive,” said Prothero, “of course I am inattentive. What is
really the matter with all this--this social mess people are in here, is
that nearly everybody is inattentive. These Big Things of yours, nobody
is thinking of them really. Everybody is thinking about the Near Things
that concern himself.”
“The bombs they threw yesterday? The Cossacks and the whips?”
“Nudges. Gestures of inattention. If everybody was thinking of the Res
Publica would there be any need for bombs?”
He pursued his advantage. “It's all nonsense to suppose people think of
politics because they are in 'em. As well suppose that the passengers on
a liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war. Before men can
think of to-morrow, they must think of to-day. Before they can think
of others, they must be sure about themselves. First of all, food; the
private, the personal economic worry. Am I safe for food? Then sex, and
until one is tranquil and not ashamed, not irritated and dissatisfied,
how can one care for other people, or for next year or the Order of the
World? How can one, Benham?”