had brought him within an inch of death, and because an emotional wave
had swept across him and across his correspondence with Amanda, Benham
went back suddenly to England and her. He wanted very greatly to see her
and also he wanted to make certain arrangements about his property. He
returned by way of Hungary, and sent telegrams like shouts of excitement
whenever the train stopped for a sufficient time. “Old Leopard, I am
coming, I am coming,” he telegraphed, announcing his coming for the
fourth time. It was to be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the
mutual refreshment of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to
Russia again.
Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the utmost
dignity of expectant maternity. Like many other people he had been a
little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a common human
experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a rare and
sacramental function. Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey,
dove-like tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had given way to
a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, her brisk little neck that had
always reminded him of the stalk of a flower was now softened and
rounded; her eyes were tender, and she moved about the place in the
manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the
scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and
a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic,
half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled
immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside
he found--it had been put there for him by Amanda--among much
other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all
philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.
Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the impending
fact. An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in
the depths of London society, but to make up for his absence Mrs. Morris
had taken a little cottage down by the river and the Wilder girls were
with her, both afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it seemed,
and more particularly Betty, prepared to be keenly critical of Benham's
attitude.
He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had
returned in a rather different vein of exaltation.
In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments an
effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed. It was as if she
put aside for him something official, something sincerely maintained,
necessary, but at times a little irksome. It was as if she was glad to
take him into her confidence and unbend. Within the pre-natal Amanda an
impish Amanda still lingered.
There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must never
know....
But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most unpontifical
moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him
home across Europe. At times she was extraordinarily jolly. They had two
or three happy walks about the Chexington woods; that year the golden
weather of October had flowed over into November, and except for a
carpet of green and gold under the horse-chestnuts most of the leaves
were still on the trees. Gleams of her old wanton humour shone on him.
And then would come something else, something like a shadow across the
world, something he had quite forgotten since his idea of heroic love
had flooded him, something that reminded him of those long explanations
with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that had never been explained, and of the
curate in the doorway of the cottage and his unaccountable tears.
On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little surprised
to find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into the garden, with
an accustomed familiarity. Sir Philip perceived him with a start that
was instantly controlled, and greeted him with unnatural ease.
Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket in
the neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending the
summer, the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from scholars
and literary men. A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought to have been
aviating or travelling.
Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that there
was a flavour of established association in their manner. But then Sir
Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne. She called him “Pip,”
and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-court to him, “Pip!” And
then he called her “Amanda.” When the Wilder girls came up to join the
tennis he was just as brotherly....
The next day he came to lunch.
During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been before
of the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes. They
watched him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that seemed at
once pained and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind
of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably
suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon
Sir Philip would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up
and go away in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he
could be spoken to he contrived to speak to Benham.
They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took advantage
of a pause to commit his little indiscretion.
“Mrs. Benham,” he said, “looks amazingly well--extraordinarily well,
don't you think?”
“Yes,” said Benham, startled. “Yes. She certainly keeps very well.”
“She misses you terribly,” said Sir Philip; “it is a time when a woman
misses her husband. But, of course, she does not want to hamper your
work....”
Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest in
these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no better
expression for this than a grunt.
“You don't mind,” said the young man with a slight catch in the breath
that might have been apprehensive, “that I sometimes bring her books and
flowers and things? Do what little I can to keep life interesting down
here? It's not very congenial.... She's so wonderful--I think she is the
most wonderful woman in the world.”
Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was
really a primitive barbarian in these matters.
“I've no doubt,” he said, “that my wife has every reason to be grateful
for your attentions.”
In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir Philip
was engendering something still more personal. If so, he might
be constrained to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of
chrysanthemums over Sir Philip's head, or kick him in an improving
manner. He had a ridiculous belief that Sir Philip would probably take
anything of the sort very touchingly. He scrambled in his mind for some
remark that would avert this possibility.
“Have you ever been in Russia?” he asked hastily. “It is the most
wonderful country in Europe. I had an odd adventure near Kiev. During a
pogrom.”
And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description....
But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were presently
thrown out by Lady Marayne. They were so much more in the air....
18
Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had foreseen.
“Easton has gone away,” he remarked three days later to Amanda.
“I told him to go. He is a bore with you about. But otherwise he is
rather a comfort, Cheetah.” She meditated upon Sir Philip. “And he's an
HONOURABLE man,” she said. “He's safe....”
19
After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in
earnest. The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic love for
the modern aristocrat ended abruptly. Instead there came the first draft
for a study of jealousy. The note was written in pencil on Chexington
notepaper and manifestly that had been supported on the ribbed cover
of a book. There was a little computation in the corner, converting
forty-five degrees Reaumur into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White
guess it had been written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it had been
written in a rather amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's
journey to the gathering revolt in Moscow....
“I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual
jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible,
something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort
to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so
easily settled with....
“One likes to know.... Possibly one wants to know too much.... In phases
of fatigue, and particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one
is leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an irrational
torment....
“And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of this
base motive. I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how strongly
jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with a
man....
“There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human being
being one's ownest own--utterly one's own....
“There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives....
“One does....
“There is something dishonouring in distrust--to both the distrusted and
the one who distrusts....”
After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.
20
Benham did not see Amanda again until after the birth of their child.
He spent his Christmas in Moscow, watching the outbreak, the fitful
fighting and the subsequent break-up, of the revolution, and taking
care of a lost and helpless English family whose father had gone astray
temporarily on the way home from Baku. Then he went southward to Rostov
and thence to Astrakhan. Here he really began his travels. He determined
to get to India by way of Herat and for the first time in his life
rode out into an altogether lawless wilderness. He went on obstinately
because he found himself disposed to funk the journey, and because
discouragements were put in his way. He was soon quite cut off from all
the ways of living he had known. He learnt what it is to be flea-bitten,
saddle-sore, hungry and, above all, thirsty. He was haunted by a dread
of fever, and so contrived strange torments for himself with overdoses
of quinine. He ceased to be traceable from Chexington in March, and he
reappeared in the form of a telegram from Karachi demanding news in May.
He learnt he was the father of a man-child and that all was well with
Amanda.
He had not expected to be so long away from any communication with the
outer world, and something in the nature of a stricken conscience took
him back to England. He found a second William Porphyry in the world,
dominating Chexington, and Amanda tenderly triumphant and passionate,
the Madonna enthroned. For William Porphyry he could feel no emotion.
William Porphyry was very red and ugly and protesting, feeble and
aggressive, a matter for a skilled nurse. To see him was to ignore him
and dispel a dream. It was to Amanda Benham turned again.
For some days he was content to adore his Madonna and listen to the
familiar flatteries of her love. He was a leaner, riper man, Amanda
said, and wiser, so that she was afraid of him....
And then he became aware that she was requiring him to stay at her side.
“We have both had our adventures,” she said, which struck him as an odd
phrase.
It forced itself upon his obstinate incredulity that all those
conceptions of heroic love and faithfulness he had supposed to be so
clearly understood between them had vanished from her mind. She had
absolutely forgotten that twilight moment at the window which had seemed
to him the crowning instant, the real marriage of their lives. It
had gone, it had left no recoverable trace in her. And upon his
interpretations of that he had loved her passionately for a year. She
was back at exactly the ideas and intentions that ruled her during their
first settlement in London. She wanted a joint life in the social world
of London, she demanded his presence, his attention, the daily practical
evidences of love. It was all very well for him to be away when the
child was coming, but now everything was different. Now he must stay by
her.
This time he argued no case. These issues he had settled for ever. Even
an indignant dissertation from Lady Marayne, a dissertation that began
with appeals and ended in taunts, did not move him. Behind these things
now was India. The huge problems of India had laid an unshakeable hold
upon his imagination. He had seen Russia, and he wanted to balance that
picture by a vision of the east....
He saw Easton only once during a week-end at Chexington. The young man
displayed no further disposition to be confidentially sentimental. But
he seemed to have something on his mind. And Amanda said not a word
about him. He was a young man above suspicion, Benham felt....
And from his departure the quality of the correspondence of these
two larger carnivores began to change. Except for the repetition of
accustomed endearments, they ceased to be love letters in any sense of
the word. They dealt chiefly with the “Cub,” and even there Benham felt
presently that the enthusiasm diminished. A new amazing quality for
Amanda appeared--triteness. The very writing of her letters changed
as though it had suddenly lost backbone. Her habitual liveliness
of phrasing lost its point. Had she lost her animation? Was she ill
unknowingly? Where had the light gone? It was as if her attention was
distracted.... As if every day when she wrote her mind was busy about
something else.
Abruptly at last he understood. A fact that had never been stated,
never formulated, never in any way admitted, was suddenly pointed to
convergently by a thousand indicating fingers, and beyond question
perceived to be THERE....
He left a record of that moment of realization.
“Suddenly one night I woke up and lay still, and it was as if I had
never seen Amanda before. Now I saw her plainly, I saw her with that
same dreadful clearness that sometimes comes at dawn, a pitiless, a
scientific distinctness that has neither light nor shadow....
“Of course,” I said, and then presently I got up very softly....
“I wanted to get out of my intolerable, close, personal cabin. I wanted
to feel the largeness of the sky. I went out upon the deck. We were off
the coast of Madras, and when I think of that moment, there comes back
to me also the faint flavour of spice in the air, the low line of the
coast, the cool flooding abundance of the Indian moonlight, the swish
of the black water against the side of the ship. And a perception of
infinite loss, as if the limitless heavens above this earth and below
to the very uttermost star were just one boundless cavity from which
delight had fled....
“Of course I had lost her. I knew it with absolute certainty. I knew it
from her insecure temperament, her adventurousness, her needs. I knew it
from every line she had written me in the last three months. I knew it
intuitively. She had been unfaithful. She must have been unfaithful.
“What had I been dreaming about to think that it would not be so?”
21
“Now let me write down plainly what I think of these matters. Let me
be at least honest with myself, whatever self-contradictions I may
have been led into by force of my passions. Always I have despised
jealousy....
“Only by the conquest of four natural limitations is the aristocratic
life to be achieved. They come in a certain order, and in that order the
spirit of man is armed against them less and less efficiently. Of fear
and my struggle against fear I have told already. I am fearful. I am a
physical coward until I can bring shame and anger to my assistance,
but in overcoming fear I have been helped by the whole body of human
tradition. Every one, the basest creatures, every Hottentot, every
stunted creature that ever breathed poison in a slum, knows that the
instinctive constitution of man is at fault here and that fear is
shameful and must be subdued. The race is on one's side. And so there is
a vast traditional support for a man against the Second Limitation, the
limitation of physical indulgence. It is not so universal as the first,
there is a grinning bawling humour on the side of grossness, but common
pride is against it. And in this matter my temperament has been my help:
I am fastidious, I eat little, drink little, and feel a shivering recoil
from excess. It is no great virtue; it happens so; it is something in
the nerves of my skin. I cannot endure myself unshaven or in any way
unclean; I am tormented by dirty hands or dirty blood or dirty memories,
and after I had once loved Amanda I could not--unless some irrational
impulse to get equal with her had caught me--have broken my faith to
her, whatever breach there was in her faith to me....
“I see that in these matters I am cleaner than most men and more easily
clean; and it may be that it is in the vein of just that distinctive
virtue that I fell so readily into a passion of resentment and anger.
“I despised a jealous man. There is a traditional discredit of jealousy,
not so strong as that against cowardice, but still very strong. But
the general contempt of jealousy is curiously wrapped up with the
supposition that there is no cause for jealousy, that it is unreasonable
suspicion. Given a cause then tradition speaks with an uncertain
voice....
“I see now that I despised jealousy because I assumed that it was
impossible for Amanda to love any one but me; it was intolerable
to imagine anything else, I insisted upon believing that she was as
fastidious as myself and as faithful as myself, made indeed after my
image, and I went on disregarding the most obvious intimations that she
was not, until that still moment in the Indian Ocean, when silently,
gently as a drowned body might rise out of the depths of a pool, that
knowledge of love dead and honour gone for ever floated up into my
consciousness.
“And then I felt that Amanda had cheated me! Outrageously. Abominably.
“Now, so far as my intelligence goes, there is not a cloud upon this
question. My demand upon Amanda was outrageous and I had no right
whatever to her love or loyalty. I must have that very clear....
“This aristocratic life, as I conceive it, must be, except accidentally
here and there, incompatible with the domestic life. It means going
hither and thither in the universe of thought as much as in the universe
of matter, it means adventure, it means movement and adventure that must
needs be hopelessly encumbered by an inseparable associate, it means
self-imposed responsibilities that will not fit into the welfare of a
family. In all ages, directly society had risen above the level of a
barbaric tribal village, this need of a release from the family for
certain necessary types of people has been recognized. It was
met sometimes informally, sometimes formally, by the growth and
establishment of special classes and orders, of priests, monks, nuns, of
pledged knights, of a great variety of non-family people, whose
concern was the larger collective life that opens out beyond the
simple necessities and duties and loyalties of the steading and of the
craftsman's house. Sometimes, but not always, that release took the form
of celibacy; but besides that there have been a hundred institutional
variations of the common life to meet the need of the special man,
the man who must go deep and the man who must go far. A vowed celibacy
ceased to be a tolerable rule for an aristocracy directly the eugenic
idea entered the mind of man, because a celibate aristocracy means the
abandonment of the racial future to a proletariat of base unleaderly
men. That was plain to Plato. It was plain to Campanelea. It was plain
to the Protestant reformers. But the world has never yet gone on to
the next step beyond that recognition, to the recognition of feminine
aristocrats, rulers and the mates of rulers, as untrammelled by domestic
servitudes and family relationships as the men of their kind. That I see
has always been my idea since in my undergraduate days I came under the
spell of Plato. It was a matter of course that my first gift to Amanda
should be his REPUBLIC. I loved Amanda transfigured in that dream....
“There are no such women....
“It is no excuse for me that I thought she was like-minded with myself.
I had no sound reason for supposing that. I did suppose that. I did not
perceive that not only was she younger than myself, but that while I
had been going through a mill of steely education, kept close, severely
exercised, polished by discussion, she had but the weak training of a
not very good school, some scrappy reading, the vague discussions
of village artists, and the draped and decorated novelties of the
'advanced.' It all went to nothing on the impact of the world.... She
showed herself the woman the world has always known, no miracle, and
the alternative was for me to give myself to her in the ancient way, to
serve her happiness, to control her and delight and companion her, or to
let her go.
“The normal woman centres upon herself; her mission is her own charm and
her own beauty and her own setting; her place is her home. She demands
the concentration of a man. Not to be able to command that is her
failure. Not to give her that is to shame her. As I had shamed
Amanda....”
22
“There are no such women.” He had written this in and struck it out, and
then at some later time written it in again. There it stayed now as his
last persuasion, but it set White thinking and doubting. And, indeed,
there was another sheet of pencilled broken stuff that seemed to glance
at quite another type of womanhood.
23
“It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the remaking of
the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as great as those
from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes. These women must
become aristocratic through their own innate impulse, they must be
self-called to their lives, exactly as men must be; there is no making
an aristocrat without a predisposition for rule and nobility. And they
have to discover and struggle against just exactly the limitations that
we have to struggle against. They have to conquer not only fear
but indulgence, indulgence of a softer, more insidious quality, and
jealousy--proprietorship....
“It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand times
in my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and desired a
mate. A mate--not a possession. It is a need almost naively simple. If
only one could have a woman who thought of one and with one! Though
she were on the other side of the world and busied about a thousand
things....
“'WITH one,' I see it must be rather than 'OF one.' That 'of one' is
just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again....
“Man is a mating creature. It is not good to be alone. But mating means
a mate....
“We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying....
“And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers. 'Dancing
attendance'--as they used to say. We should meet upon our ways as the
great carnivores do....
“That at any rate was a sound idea. Though we only played with it.
“But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible
satisfaction now for me. What is the good of dreaming? Life and chance
have played a trick upon my body and soul. I am mated, though I am
mated to a phantom. I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton's Amanda, but
Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams. Sense, and particularly the
sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason in us. There can be no mate
for me now unless she comes with Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and
Amanda's quick movements and her clever hands....”
24
“Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?