after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging. Windows have still to be
mended, smashed doors restored. There's blood-stains still on some
of the houses. There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and in the
Ochrana prison. This morning there were executions. Is it anything more
than an eddy in the real life of the place? Watch the customers in the
shops, the crowd in the streets, the men in the cafes who stare at the
passing women. They are all swallowed up again in their own business.
They just looked up as the Cossacks galloped past; they just shifted a
bit when the bullets spat....”
And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing
adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide of
the private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him back to
Cambridge--changed.
Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to
disregard Prothero. He was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble
of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the hurrying
darknesses of an approaching storm. In those days it looked as though it
must be an overwhelming storm. He was drinking in the wide and massive
Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the entangling streets, the
houses with their strange lettering in black and gold, the innumerable
barbaric churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the sombre red fortress
of the Kremlin, with its bulbous churches clustering up into the sky,
the crosses, the innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil,
carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of permissible caricature,
and in this setting the obscure drama of clustering, staring,
sash-wearing peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand
varieties of uniform, a running and galloping to and fro of messengers,
a flutter of little papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and
portentous, a gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on
to a perpetual clash and clamour of bells. Benham had brought letters of
introduction to a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed. They
were “away,” the porters said, and they continued to be “away,”--it was
the formula, he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few showed
themselves extraordinarily anxious to inform him about things, to
explain themselves and things about them exhaustively. One young student
took him to various meetings and showed him in great detail the scene of
the recent murder of the Grand Duke Sergius. The buildings opposite the
old French cannons were still under repair. “The assassin stood just
here. The bomb fell there, look! right down there towards the gate; that
was where they found his arm. He was torn to fragments. He was scraped
up. He was mixed with the horses....”
Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter of
days or at the utmost weeks. And whatever question Benham chose to
ask these talkers were prepared to answer. Except one. “And after the
revolution,” he asked, “what then?...” Then they waved their hands, and
failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.
He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous drift
towards a conflict. He was trying to piece together a process, if it
was one and the same process, which involved riots in Lodz, fighting at
Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal battlings in Manchuria,
the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in the
Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was trying to rationalize
it all in his mind, to comprehend its direction. He was struggling
strenuously with the obscurities of the language in which these things
were being discussed about him, a most difficult language demanding new
sets of visual images because of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder
that for a time he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some
entirely disconnected affair.
They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre Square.
Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-looking men
with peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's friends and
guides to take him out and show him this and that. At first Prothero
always accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then he began to make
excuses. He would stay behind in the hotel. Then when Benham returned
Prothero would have disappeared. When the porter was questioned about
Prothero his nescience was profound.
One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who
wanted to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was
alarmed.
“Moscow is a late place,” said Benham's student friend. “You need not
be anxious until after four or five in the morning. It will be quite
time--QUITE time to be anxious to-morrow. He may be--close at hand.”
When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him
sleepy and irritable.
“I don't trouble if YOU are late,” said Prothero, sitting up in his bed
with a red resentful face and crumpled hair. “I wasn't born yesterday.”
“I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow.”
“I don't want to leave Moscow.”
“But Odessa--Odessa is the centre of interest just now.”
“I want to stay in Moscow.”
Benham looked baffled.
Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon them.
“I don't want to leave Moscow,” he said, “and I'm not going to do so.”
“But haven't we done--”
Prothero interrupted. “You may. But I haven't. We're not after the
same things. Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest me. I've
found--different things.”
His expression was extraordinarily defiant.
“I want,” he went on, “to put our affairs on a different footing. Now
you've opened the matter we may as well go into it. You were good enough
to bring me here.... There was a sort of understanding we were working
together.... We aren't.... The long and short of it is, Benham, I want
to pay you for my journey here and go on my own--independently.”
His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly
incredible in him.
Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters
jerked back into Benham's memory. It popped back so suddenly that for an
instant he wanted to laugh. He turned towards the window, picked his
way among Prothero's carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment
staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing
fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS. Then he
turned.
“Billy,” he said, “didn't I see you the other evening driving towards
the Hermitage?”
“Yes,” said Prothero, and added, “that's it.”
“You were with a lady.”
“And she IS a lady,” said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face
twitched as though he was going to weep.
“She's a Russian?”
“She had an English mother. Oh, you needn't stand there and look so
damned ironical! She's--she's a woman. She's a thing of kindness....”
He was too full to go on.
“Billy, old boy,” said Benham, distressed, “I don't want to be
ironical--”
Prothero had got his voice again.
“You'd better know,” he said, “you'd better know. She's one of those
women who live in this hotel.”
“Live in this hotel!”
“On the fourth floor. Didn't you know? It's the way in most of these big
Russian hotels. They come down and sit about after lunch and dinner. A
woman with a yellow ticket. Oh! I don't care. I don't care a rap. She's
been kind to me; she's--she's dear to me. How are you to understand? I
shall stop in Moscow. I shall take her to England. I can't live without
her, Benham. And then-- And then you come worrying me to come to your
damned Odessa!”
And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face
as though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an
apoplectic moment burst noisily into tears. They ran between his
fingers. “Get out of my room,” he shouted, suffocatingly. “What business
have you to come prying on me?”
Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared
round-eyed at his friend. His hands were in his pockets. For a time he
said nothing.
“Billy,” he began at last, and stopped again. “Billy, in this country
somehow one wants to talk like a Russian. Billy, my dear--I'm not your
father, I'm not your judge. I'm--unreasonably fond of you. It's not my
business to settle what is right or wrong for you. If you want to stay
in Moscow, stay in Moscow. Stay here, and stay as my guest....”
He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.
“I didn't know,” said Prothero brokenly; “I didn't know it was possible
to get so fond of a person....”
Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero so attractive and so
abominable in his life before.
“I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I'll make things all right here
before I go....”
He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound thought to
his own room....
Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to
explain what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about the
room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.
In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to have
shrunken to something sleek and small.
“I wish,” he said, “you could stay for a later train and have lunch and
meet her. She's not the ordinary thing. She's--different.”
Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. “Billy,” he said, “no woman IS the
ordinary thing. They are all--different....”
14
For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as
disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any
matter to be. While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and travelled
hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in the endless
tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero
was lost to all those large issues in the development of his personal
situation. He contributed nothing to Benham's thought except attempts at
discouragement. He reiterated his declaration that all the vast
stress and change of Russian national life was going on because it was
universally disregarded. “I tell you, as I told you before, that nobody
is attending. You think because all Moscow, all Russia, is in the
picture, that everybody is concerned. Nobody is concerned. Nobody cares
what is happening. Even the men who write in newspapers and talk at
meetings about it don't care. They are thinking of their dinners, of
their clothes, of their money, of their wives. They hurry home....”
That was his excuse.
Manifestly it was an excuse.
His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy and
divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible. To
Benham in those days everything was very simple in this business of
love. The aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all. He had to love
Amanda. He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in
love, he felt, than they had ever been before. They were now writing
love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation that was almost
voluptuous. She found in the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to
him and to the natural fate of women, a delightful exercise for her very
considerable powers of expression. Life pointed now wonderfully to the
great time ahead when there would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and
meanwhile the Cheetah loped about the wild world upon a mighty quest. In
such terms she put it. Such foolishness written in her invincibly square
and youthful hand went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up
against his return in the porter's office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or
pursued him down through the jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or
waited for him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his journeyings
wastefully or in several instances went altogether astray. Perhaps they
supplied self-educating young strikers in the postal service with useful
exercises in the deciphering of manuscript English. He wrote back five
hundred different ways of saying that he loved her extravagantly....
It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and
solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world;
Heroic Love to its highest note--and then you go about your business. It
seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin high and diffuse
a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate multitudes who stewed in
affliction and hate because they had failed as yet to find this simple,
culminating elucidation. And Prothero--Prothero, too, was now achieving
the same grand elementariness, out of his lusts and protests and general
physical squalor he had flowered into love. For a time it is true it
made rather an ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere
goose-stepping for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay
exaltation. Benham had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this
Anglo-Russian, who was a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had
seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him,
and his impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with
dusky hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her,
a quiet alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda. And
if she liked old Prothero-- And, indeed, she must like old Prothero or
could she possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?
They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero's soul
would wake up and face the world again. What did it matter what she had
been?
Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained anxiety
and the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering towards
revolution, Benham went with his own love like a lamp within him
and this affair of Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was quite
prepared for the most sympathetic and liberal behaviour when he came
back to Moscow to make the lady's acquaintance. He intended to help
Prothero to marry and take her back to Cambridge, and to assist by every
possible means in destroying and forgetting the official yellow ticket
that defined her status in Moscow. But he reckoned without either
Prothero or the young lady in this expectation.
It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations
that there were obscure obstacles to this manifest course. Prothero
hesitated; the lady expressed doubts.
On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished. It was
chiefly a similarity of complexion. She had a more delicate face than
Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none of
Amanda's glow, and she spoke her mother's language with a pretty halting
limp that was very different from Amanda's clear decisions.
She put her case compactly.
“I would not DO in Cambridge,” she said with an infinitesimal glance at
Prothero.
“Mr. Benham,” she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman
of affairs, “now do you see me in Cambridge? Now do you see me? Kept
outside the walls? In a little DATCHA? With no occupation? Just to amuse
him.”
And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved
still completer lucidity.
“I would come if I thought he wanted me to come,” she said. “But you see
if I came he would not want me to come. Because then he would have me
and so he wouldn't want me. He would just have the trouble. And I am not
sure if I should be happy in Cambridge. I am not sure I should be happy
enough to make him happy. It is a very learned and intelligent and
charming society, of course; but here, THINGS HAPPEN. At Cambridge
nothing happens--there is only education. There is no revolution in
Cambridge; there are not even sinful people to be sorry for.... And
he says himself that Cambridge people are particular. He says they are
liberal but very, very particular, and perhaps I could not always act my
part well. Sometimes I am not always well behaved. When there is music I
behave badly sometimes, or when I am bored. He says the Cambridge people
are so liberal that they do not mind what you are, but he says they are
so particular that they mind dreadfully how you are what you are.... So
that it comes to exactly the same thing....”
“Anna Alexievna,” said Benham suddenly, “are you in love with Prothero?”
Her manner became conscientiously scientific.
“He is very kind and very generous--too generous. He keeps sending for
more money--hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him.”
“Were you EVER in love?”
“Of course. But it's all gone long ago. It was like being hungry. Only
very fine hungry. Exquisite hungry.... And then being disgusted....”
“He is in love with you.”
“What is love?” said Anna. “He is grateful. He is by nature grateful.”
She smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who looks down on
her bambino.
“And you love nothing?”
“I love Russia--and being alone, being completely alone. When I am dead
perhaps I shall be alone. Not even my own body will touch me then.”
Then she added, “But I shall be sorry when he goes.”
Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone. “Your Anna,” he said, “is
rather wonderful. At first, I tell you now frankly I did not like her
very much, I thought she looked 'used,' she drank vodka at lunch, she
was gay, uneasily; she seemed a sham thing. All that was prejudice. She
thinks; she's generous, she's fine.”
“She's tragic,” said Prothero as though it was the same thing.
He spoke as though he noted an objection. His next remark confirmed this
impression. “That's why I can't take her back to Cambridge,” he said.
“You see, Benham,” he went on, “she's human. She's not really feminine.
I mean, she's--unsexed. She isn't fitted to be a wife or a mother any
more. We've talked about the possible life in England, very plainly.
I've explained what a household in Cambridge would mean.... It doesn't
attract her.... In a way she's been let out from womanhood, forced out
of womanhood, and I see now that when women are let out from womanhood
there's no putting them back. I could give a lecture on Anna. I see
now that if women are going to be wives and mothers and homekeepers and
ladies, they must be got ready for it from the beginning, sheltered,
never really let out into the wild chances of life. She has been.
Bitterly. She's REALLY emancipated. And it's let her out into a sort of
nothingness. She's no longer a woman, and she isn't a man. She ought
to be able to go on her own--like a man. But I can't take her back to
Cambridge. Even for her sake.”
His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.
“You won't be happy in Cambridge--alone,” said Benham.
“Oh, damnably not! But what can I do? I had at first some idea of coming
to Moscow for good--teaching.”
He paused. “Impossible. I'm worth nothing here. I couldn't have kept
her.”
“Then what are you going to do, Billy?”
“I don't KNOW what I'm going to do, I tell you. I live for the moment.
To-morrow we are going out into the country.”
“I don't understand,” said Benham with a gesture of resignation. “It
seems to me that if a man and woman love each other--well, they insist
upon each other. What is to happen to her if you leave her in Moscow?”
“Damnation! Is there any need to ask that?”
“Take her to Cambridge, man. And if Cambridge objects, teach Cambridge
better manners.”
Prothero's face was suddenly transfigured with rage.
“I tell you she won't come!” he said.
“Billy!” said Benham, “you should make her!”
“I can't.”
“If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything--”
“But I don't love her like that,” said Prothero, shrill with anger. “I
tell you I don't love her like that.”
Then he lunged into further deeps. “It's the other men,” he said, “it's
the things that have been. Don't you understand? Can't you understand?
The memories--she must have memories--they come between us. It's
something deeper than reason. It's in one's spine and under one's nails.
One could do anything, I perceive, for one's very own woman....”
“MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.
“I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How could any man make her
his very own woman now? You--you don't seem to understand--ANYTHING.
She's nobody's woman--for ever. That--that might-have-been has gone for
ever.... It's nerves--a passion of the nerves. There's a cruelty in life
and-- She's KIND to me. She's so kind to me....”
And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.
15
The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken
fragments in letters. When he looked for Anna Alexievna in December--he
never learnt her surname--he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar
soon after Prothero's departure and he could not find whither she had
gone. He never found her again. Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.
Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion. But
Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock
to Benham's ideas. It was clear he went off almost callously; it would
seem there was very little crying. Towards the end it was evident that
the two had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very end of all. It
was almost as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go.
Then came regret, a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with
every mile of distance.
In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero. He had some hours
there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy
with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious
secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant
resemblance to Anna....
In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back.
“But now I had the damned frontier,” he wrote, “between us.”
It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the
“damned frontier” tip the balance against him.
Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it
seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured. “I can't stand this
business,” he wrote. “It has things in it, possibilities of emotional
disturbance--you can have no idea! In the train--luckily I was alone in
the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it,
I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar! A beastly German came and
stood in the corridor to stare. I had to get out of the train. It is
disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this....
“Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you
about my dismal feelings....”
After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but
to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable
regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of
his friend. Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.
“There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris,” he wrote. “A levity.
I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet undescribed
radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of those
tear-compelling German emanations....
“And, Benham, I have found a friend.
“A woman. Of course you will laugh, you will sneer. You do not
understand these things.... Yet they are so simple. It was the strangest
accident brought us together. There was something that drew us together.
A sort of instinct. Near the Boulevard Poissoniere....”
“Good heavens!” said Benham. “A sort of instinct!”
“I told her all about Anna!”
“Good Lord!” cried Benham.
“She understood. Perfectly. None of your so-called 'respectable' women
could have understood.... At first I intended merely to talk to her....”
Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.
“Little Anna Alexievna!” he said, “you were too clean for him.”
16
Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel
meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief,
to the grey mildness of Trinity. He saw him, capped and gowned,
and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming
friendships.
The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts
and restrained celibates at the high tables. They ate on in their mature
wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled. Presently they would
withdraw processionally to the combination room....
There would be much to talk about over the wine.
Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow....
He laughed abruptly.
And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space
of years. There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost
in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office. Perhaps
to this day they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in
Kishinev or Ekaterinoslav....
17