beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind
hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression,
images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight
in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off
wonderful music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing
softly, of floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and
sudden as the knife of an assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears,
tears that are happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations,
gratitudes, sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft
eyelid closed in sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard
unexpectedly; sweet, dear magical things that I can find no words
for....
“If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that she
was not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that has been
between us more cheaply than I did? It does not change one jot of it for
me. At the time she did not hold it cheaply. She forgets where I do not
forget....”
25
Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.
Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda and
himself.
He did not at once turn homeward. It was in Ceylon that he dropped his
work and came home. At Colombo he found a heap of letters awaiting him,
and there were two of these that had started at the same time. They had
been posted in London on one eventful afternoon. Lady Marayne and Amanda
had quarrelled violently. Two earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women,
full of neat but belated repartee, separated to write their simultaneous
letters. Each letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.
Lady Marayne told her story ruthlessly. Amanda, on the other hand,
generalized, and explained. Sir Philip's adoration of her was a
love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure. Was there no trust nor
courage in the world? She would defy all jealous scandal. She would not
even banish him from her side. Surely the Cheetah could trust her. But
the pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond Amanda's explaining. The
little lady's dignity had been stricken. “I have been used as a cloak,”
she wrote.
Her phrases were vivid. She quoted the very words of Amanda, words she
had overheard at Chexington in the twilight. They were no invention.
They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover. It was as sure as if
Benham had heard the sound of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen,
as if she had crept by him, stooping and rustling softly. It brought
back the living sense of her, excited, flushed, reckless; his
wild-haired Amanda of infinite delight.... All day those words of hers
pursued him. All night they flared across the black universe. He buried
his face in the pillows and they whispered softly in his ear.
He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.
He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the
stirring quiet of the stars.
He sent no notice of his coming back. Nor did he come back with a
definite plan. But he wanted to get at Amanda.
26
It was with Amanda he had to reckon. Towards Easton he felt scarcely any
anger at all. Easton he felt only existed for him because Amanda willed
to have it so.
Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger. His
devotion filled Benham with scorn. His determination to serve Amanda at
any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights for her,
his humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her moods and
happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility. That rage
against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist against a blackleg.
Are all the women to fall to the men who will be their master-slaves and
keepers? But it was not simply that Benham felt men must be freed from
this incessant attendance; women too must free themselves from their
almost instinctive demand for an attendant....
His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings. Never
in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and
won and competed for and fought over. So that it was Amanda he wanted
to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses
only to fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and jealous fury.
But the forces that were driving him home now were the forces below the
level of reason and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and desire,
profound aboriginal urgencies. He thought, indeed, very little as he
lay in his berth or sulked on deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless
invasion of exasperating images that ever and again would so wring him
that his muscles would tighten and his hands clench or he would find
himself restraining a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.
Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole world.
She filled the skies. She bent over him and mocked him. She became a
mystery of passion and dark beauty. She was the sin of the world. One
breathed her in the winds of the sea. She had taken to herself the
greatness of elemental things....
So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see that
she was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather tired and
very frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an evening-dress of
unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of gold and colour about
her wrists and neck.
In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him
homeward. He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has
greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.
For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to kill
than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.
27
He took them by surprise. It had been his intention to take them by
surprise. Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.
He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near Charing
Cross. In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in Lancaster
Gate. The butler was deferentially amazed. Mrs. Benham was, he said, at
a theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought some other people also.
He did not know when she would be back. She might go on to supper. It
was not the custom for the servants to wait up for her.
Benham went into the study that reduplicated his former rooms in Finacue
Street and sat down before the fire the butler lit for him. He sent the
man to bed, and fell into profound meditation.
It was nearly two o'clock when he heard the sound of her latchkey and
went out at once upon the landing.
The half-door stood open and Easton's car was outside. She stood in
the middle of the hall and relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he was
carrying.
“Good-night,” she said, “I am so tired.”
“My wonderful goddess,” he said.
She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, then started, stared, and
wrenched herself out of his arms.
Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon them,
white-faced and inexpressive. Easton dropped back a pace. For a moment
no one moved nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton shut the half-door
and shut out the noises of the road.
For some seconds Benham regarded them, and as he did so his spirit
changed....
Everything he had thought of saying and doing vanished out of his mind.
He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended the staircase. When
he was five or six steps above them, he spoke. “Just sit down here,” he
said, with a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself upon the stairs.
“DO sit down,” he said with a sudden testiness as they continued
standing. “I know all about this affair. Do please sit down and let us
talk.... Everybody's gone to bed long ago.”
“Cheetah!” she said. “Why have you come back like this?”
Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet.
“I wish you would sit down, Easton,” he said in a voice of subdued
savagery.
“Why have you come back?” Sir Philip Easton found his voice to ask.
“SIT down,” Benham spat, and Easton obeyed unwillingly.
“I came back,” Benham went on, “to see to all this. Why else? I
don't--now I see you--feel very fierce about it. But it has distressed
me. You look changed, Amanda, and fagged. And your hair is untidy. It's
as if something had happened to you and made you a stranger.... You two
people are lovers. Very natural and simple, but I want to get out of it.
Yes, I want to get out of it. That wasn't quite my idea, but now I see
it is. It's queer, but on the whole I feel sorry for you. All of us,
poor humans--. There's reason to be sorry for all of us. We're full
of lusts and uneasiness and resentments that we haven't the will to
control. What do you two people want me to do to you? Would you like a
divorce, Amanda? It's the clean, straight thing, isn't it? Or would the
scandal hurt you?”
Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on Benham.
“Give us a divorce,” said Easton, looking to her to confirm him.
Amanda shook her head.
“I don't want a divorce,” she said.
“Then what do you want?” asked Benham with sudden asperity.
“I don't want a divorce,” she repeated. “Why do you, after a long
silence, come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?”
“It was the way it took me,” said Benham, after a little interval.
“You have left me for long months.”
“Yes. I was angry. And it was ridiculous to be angry. I thought I wanted
to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is to help
you out of this miserable mess--and then get away from you. You two
would like to marry. You ought to be married.”
“I would die to make Amanda happy,” said Easton.
“Your business, it seems to me, is to live to make her happy. That you
may find more of a strain. Less tragic and more tiresome. I, on the
other hand, want neither to die nor live for her.” Amanda moved sharply.
“It's extraordinary what amazing vapours a lonely man may get into his
head. If you don't want a divorce then I suppose things might go on as
they are now.”
“I hate things as they are now,” said Easton. “I hate this falsehood and
deception.”
“You would hate the scandal just as much,” said Amanda.
“I would not care what the scandal was unless it hurt you.”
“It would be only a temporary inconvenience,” said Benham. “Every one
would sympathize with you.... The whole thing is so natural.... People
would be glad to forget very soon. They did with my mother.”
“No,” said Amanda, “it isn't so easy as that.”
She seemed to come to a decision.
“Pip,” she said. “I want to talk to--HIM--alone.”
Easton's brown eyes were filled with distress and perplexity. “But why?”
he asked.
“I do,” she said.
“But this is a thing for US.”
“Pip, I want to talk to him alone. There is something--something I can't
say before you....”
Sir Philip rose slowly to his feet.
“Shall I wait outside?”
“No, Pip. Go home. Yes,--there are some things you must leave to me.”
She stood up too and turned so that she and Benham both faced the
younger man. The strangest uneasiness mingled with his resolve to be
at any cost splendid. He felt--and it was a most unexpected and
disconcerting feeling--that he was no longer confederated with Amanda;
that prior, more fundamental and greater associations prevailed over his
little new grip upon her mind and senses. He stared at husband and wife
aghast in this realization. Then his resolute romanticism came to his
help. “I would trust you--” he began. “If you tell me to go--”
Amanda seemed to measure her hold upon him.
She laid her hand upon his arm. “Go, my dear Pip,” she said. “Go.”
He had a moment of hesitation, of anguish, and it seemed to Benham
as though he eked himself out with unreality, as though somewhen,
somewhere, he had seen something of the sort in a play and filled in a
gap that otherwise he could not have supplied.
Then the door had closed upon him, and Amanda, pale and darkly
dishevelled, faced her husband, silently and intensely.
“WELL?” said Benham.
She held out her arms to him.
“Why did you leave me, Cheetah? Why did you leave me?”
28
Benham affected to ignore those proffered arms. But they recalled in
a swift rush the animal anger that had brought him back to England.
To remind him of desire now was to revive an anger stronger than any
desire. He spoke seeking to hurt her.
“I am wondering now,” he said, “why the devil I came back.”
“You had to come back to me.”
“I could have written just as well about these things.”
“CHEETAH,” she said softly, and came towards him slowly, stooping
forward and looking into his eyes, “you had to come back to see your old
Leopard. Your wretched Leopard. Who has rolled in the dirt. And is still
yours.”
“Do you want a divorce? How are we to fix things, Amanda?”
“Cheetah, I will tell you how we will fix things.”
She dropped upon the step below him. She laid her hands with a
deliberate softness upon him, she gave a toss so that her disordered
hair was a little more disordered, and brought her soft chin down to
touch his knees. Her eyes implored him.
“Cheetah,” she said. “You are going to forgive.”
He sat rigid, meeting her eyes.
“Amanda,” he said at last, “you would be astonished if I kicked you away
from me and trampled over you to the door. That is what I want to do.”
“Do it,” she said, and the grip of her hands tightened. “Cheetah, dear!
I would love you to kill me.”
“I don't want to kill you.”
Her eyes dilated. “Beat me.”
“And I haven't the remotest intention of making love to you,” he said,
and pushed her soft face and hands away from him as if he would stand
up.
She caught hold of him again. “Stay with me,” she said.
He made no effort to shake off her grip. He looked at the dark cloud of
her hair that had ruled him so magically, and the memory of old delights
made him grip a great handful almost inadvertently as he spoke. “Dear
Leopard,” he said, “we humans are the most streaky of conceivable
things. I thought I hated you. I do. I hate you like poison. And also I
do not hate you at all.”
Then abruptly he was standing over her.
She rose to her knees.
“Stay here, old Cheetah!” she said. “This is your house. I am your
wife.”
He went towards the unfastened front door.
“Cheetah!” she cried with a note of despair.
He halted at the door.
“Amanda, I will come to-morrow. I will come in the morning, in the sober
London daylight, and then we will settle things.”
He stared at her, and to her amazement he smiled. He spoke as one who
remarks upon a quite unexpected fact....
“Never in my life, Amanda, have I seen a human being that I wanted so
little to kill.”
29
White found a fragment that might have been written within a week of
those last encounters of Benham and Amanda.
“The thing that astonished me most in Amanda was the change in her
mental quality.
“With me in the old days she had always been a sincere person; she had
deceived me about facts, but she had never deceived me about herself.
Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it
was gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing
of poses and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei.
Beneath that surface I could not discover anything individual at all.
Fear and a grasping quality, such as God gave us all when he gave us
hands; but the individual I knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard
was gone. Whither, I cannot imagine. An amazing disappearance. Clean out
of space and time like a soul lost for ever.
“When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene, she
acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in reality....
“I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this way,
by cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she despised....
There can be no inequality in love. Give and take must balance. One must
be one's natural self or the whole business is an indecent trick, a vile
use of life! To use inferiors in love one must needs talk down to
them, interpret oneself in their insufficient phrases, pretend,
sentimentalize. And it is clear that unless oneself is to be lost, one
must be content to leave alone all those people that one can reach
only by sentimentalizing. But Amanda--and yet somehow I love her for
it still--could not leave any one alone. So she was always feverishly
weaving nets of false relationship. Until her very self was forgotten.
So she will go on until the end. With Easton it had been necessary for
her to key herself to a simple exalted romanticism that was entirely
insincere. She had so accustomed herself to these poses that her innate
gestures were forgotten. She could not recover them; she could not
even reinvent them. Between us there were momentary gleams as though
presently we should be our frank former selves again. They were never
more than momentary....”
And that was all that this astonishing man had seen fit to tell of his
last parting from his wife.
Perhaps he did Amanda injustice. Perhaps there was a stronger thread
of reality in her desire to recover him than he supposed. Clearly he
believed that under the circumstances Amanda would have tried to recover
anybody.
She had dressed for that morning's encounter in a very becoming and
intimate wrap of soft mauve and white silk, and she had washed and dried
her dark hair so that it was a vapour about her face. She set herself
with a single mind to persuade herself and Benham that they were
inseparable lovers, and she would not be deflected by his grim
determination to discuss the conditions of their separation. When he
asked her whether she wanted a divorce, she offered to throw over
Sir Philip and banish him for ever as lightly as a great lady might
sacrifice an objectionable poodle to her connubial peace.
Benham passed through perplexing phases, so that she herself began to
feel that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands. His initial
grimness she could understand, and partially its breakdown into
irritability. But she was puzzled by his laughter. For he laughed
abruptly.
“You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of tremendous tragedy. And
really,--you are a Lark.”
And then overriding her altogether, he told her what he meant to do
about their future and the future of their little son.
“You don't want a divorce and a fuss. Then I'll leave things. I perceive
I've no intention of marrying any more. But you'd better do the straight
thing. People forget and forgive. Especially when there is no one about
making a fuss against you.
“Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for shirking it.
We'll both be able to get at the boy then. You'll not hurt him, and
I shall want to see him. It's better for the boy anyhow not to have a
divorce.
“I'll not stand in your way. I'll get a little flat and I shan't come
too much to London, and when I do, you can get out of town. You must be
discreet about Easton, and if people say anything about him, send them
to me. After all, this is our private affair.
“We'll go on about money matters as we have been going. I trust to you
not to run me into overwhelming debts. And, of course, if at any time,
you do want to marry--on account of children or anything--if nobody
knows of this conversation we can be divorced then....”
Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while Amanda
gathered her forces for her last appeal.
It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down
before him and clung to his knees. He struggled ridiculously to get
himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate on
the floor with her dishevelled hair about her.
She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark
Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet
without. He had come back. The door reopened. There was a slight pause,
and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the second
housemaid. There are moments, suspended fragments of time rather than
links in its succession, when the human eye is more intelligible than
any words.
The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a click of
the door.
“DAMN!” said Amanda.
Then slowly she rose to her knees.
She meditated through vast moments.
“It's a cursed thing to be a woman,” said Amanda. She stood up. She put
her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot about it.
After another long interval of thought she spoke.
“Cheetah!” she said, “Old Cheetah!...
“I didn't THINK it of you....”
Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a
reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who
packs a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.
30
The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in
Danebury Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham's private
processes the morning after this affair.
Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London. She
had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly
decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to
behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way. On the
morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor waiter that the
occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar in the night, and almost
immediately she was summoned to see Benham.
He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little
obscure the condition of the room behind him. He was carefully dressed,
and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever. But one of his
hands was tied up in a white bandage.
“I am going this morning,” he said, “I am going down now to breakfast. I
have had a few little accidents with some of the things in the room and
I have cut my hand. I want you to tell the manager and see that they are
properly charged for on the bill.... Thank you.”
The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.
Benham's things were all packed up and the room had an air of having
been straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive
cataclysm. One or two items that the chambermaid might possibly have
overlooked in the normal course of things were carefully exhibited. For
example, the sheet had been torn into half a dozen strips and they were
lying side by side on the bed. The clock on the mantelpiece had
been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded to pieces. All the
looking-glasses in the room were smashed, apparently the electric lamp
that stood on the night table by the bedside had been wrenched off and
flung or hammered about amidst the other breakables. And there was
a considerable amount of blood splashed about the room. The head
chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the spectacle and
summoned her most convenient friend, the head chambermaid on the third
floor, to her aid. The first-floor waiter joined their deliberations
and several housemaids displayed a respectful interest in the matter.
Finally they invoked the manager. He was still contemplating the scene
of the disorder when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates warned
him of Benham's return.
Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly
tranquil.
“I had a kind of nightmare,” he said. “I am fearfully sorry to have
disarranged your room. You must charge me for the inconvenience as well
as for the damage.”
31
“An aristocrat cannot be a lover.”
“One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of life
and the intricacies of another human being. I do not mean that one may
not love. One loves the more because one does not concentrate one's
love. One loves nations, the people passing in the street, beasts hurt
by the wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons in tears....
“But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's hands
I do not think one can expect to be loved.
“An aristocrat must do without close personal love....”
This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper. The writing ended
halfway down the page. Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning. And it
was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter
that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations. Its incompleteness
made its expression perfect....
There Benham's love experience ended. He turned to the great business
of the world. Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like
Fear they were to be dismissed as far as possible and subdued when
they could not be altogether dismissed. Whatever stirrings of blood or
imagination there were in him after that parting, whatever failures from
this resolution, they left no trace on the rest of his research, which
was concerned with the hates of peoples and classes and war and peace
and the possibilities science unveils and starry speculations of what
mankind may do.
32
But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter
with Lady Marayne.
The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger and
distress. Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so hopelessly
dispersed and mixed. And when for a moment it seemed to him that she was
not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all, then with an instant
eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory gleam. “What are you doing
in England, Poff?” she demanded. “And what are you going to do?