property and a lover. If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come back?
And why did you ever marry her? You might have known; her father was a
swindler. She's begotten of deceit. She'll tell her own story while you
are away, and a pretty story she'll make of it.”
“Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?”
“I never wanted you to go away from her. If you'd stayed and watched her
as a man should, as I begged you and implored you to do. Didn't I tell
you, Poff? Didn't I warn you?”
“But now what am I to do?”
“There you are! That's just a man's way. You get yourself into this
trouble, you follow your passions and your fancies and fads and then
you turn to me! How can I help you now, Poff? If you'd listened to me
before!”
Her blue eyes were demonstratively round.
“Yes, but--”
“I warned you,” she interrupted. “I warned you. I've done all I could
for you. It isn't that I haven't seen through her. When she came to me
at first with that made-up story of a baby! And all about loving me like
her own mother. But I did what I could. I thought we might still make
the best of a bad job. And then--. I might have known she couldn't leave
Pip alone.... But for weeks I didn't dream. I wouldn't dream. Right
under my nose. The impudence of it!”
Her voice broke. “Such a horrid mess! Such a hopeless, horrid mess!”
She wiped away a bright little tear....
“It's all alike. It's your way with us. All of you. There isn't a man
in the world deserves to have a woman in the world. We do all we can
for you. We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for you and we talk for
you. All the sweet, warm little women there are! And then you go away
from us! There never was a woman yet who pleased and satisfied a man,
who did not lose him. Give you everything and off you must go! Lovers,
mothers....”
It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother's troubles did not deal
exclusively with himself.
“But Amanda,” he began.
“If you'd looked after her properly, it would have been right enough.
Pip was as good as gold until she undermined him.... A woman can't wait
about like an umbrella in a stand.... He was just a boy.... Only of
course there she was--a novelty. It is perfectly easy to understand. She
flattered him.... Men are such fools.”
“Still--it's no good saying that now.”
“But she'll spend all your money, Poff! She'll break your back with
debts. What's to prevent her? With him living on her! For that's what it
comes to practically.”
“Well, what am I to do?”
“You aren't going back without tying her up, Poff? You ought to stop
every farthing of her money--every farthing. It's your duty.”
“I can't do things like that.”
“But have you no Shame? To let that sort of thing go on!”
“If I don't feel the Shame of it-- And I don't.”
“And that money--. I got you that money, Poff! It was my money.”
Benham stared at her perplexed. “What am I to do?” he asked.
“Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay her through a solicitor.
Say that if she sees him ONCE again--”
He reflected. “No,” he said at last.
“Poff!” she cried, “every time I see you, you are more and more like
your father. You're going off--just as he did. That baffled, MULISH
look--priggish--solemn! Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor woman has to
bring into the world. But you'll do nothing. I know you'll do nothing.
You'll stand everything. You--you Cuckold! And she'll drive by me,
she'll pass me in theatres with the money that ought to have been mine!
Oh! Oh!”
She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other. But she
went on talking. Faster and faster, less and less coherently; more and
more wildly abusive. Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham
sighed profoundly....
It brought the scene to a painful end....
For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.
He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in
default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her--he
could never define what he owed her.
And yet, what on earth was one to do?
And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had
misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred
goodwill. He went down to see him before he returned to India. But if
there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham senior, it had been
very carefully boarded over. The parental mind and attention were
entirely engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD about the heuristic
method. Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the
thing was rankling almost unendurably. It seemed to be a relief to him
to show his son very fully the essentially illogical position of his
assailant. He was entirely inattentive to Benham's carefully made
conversational opportunities. He would be silent at times while Benham
talked and then he would break out suddenly with: “What seems to me
so unreasonable, so ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow's second
argument--if one can call it an argument--.... A man who reasons as he
does is bound to get laughed at. If people will only see it....”
CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
1
Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913. Sometimes
the two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection,
sometimes with great bitterness. When he met White in Johannesburg
during the strike period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in London
and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite footing.
It was her suggestion that they should meet.
About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction. He could not
persuade himself that his treatment of her and that his relations to
her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at no
precise point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ignoble
step. Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life. Like
all of us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life
in a certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an
entirely different and unexpected way.... He had been ready for noble
deeds and villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the
dominant fact of his personal life was a perplexing riddle. He could
not hate and condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of
exoneration; he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without
immediate shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he
could not banish her from his mind.
During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his
mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but
often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing
denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing
accepted. Meanwhile he worked. His nervous irritability increased, but
it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.
Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and
method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put
together under his headings of the first three “Limitations.” He
had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that
instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which
he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of
Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda.
He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown that beating in his
brain.
Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere
prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this dream
of a larger human purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and
define that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and
comprehending form of all the activities of the noble life. One cannot
be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to
an end. To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing more
comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous and coherent than it is
to-day seemed to him the fundamental intention of all nobility. He
believed more and more firmly that the impulses to make and help and
subserve great purposes are abundantly present in the world, that they
are inhibited by hasty thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and
that the real ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a
release. He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men
dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and
he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult
limitation. In one place he had written it, “Prejudice or Divisions.”
That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in the measure of
its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great age, the noble age,
would begin.
So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world
about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties
and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White
struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of
this search for “Prejudice.” It seemed to White to be at once the most
magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises. It was indeed no
less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure
and disorder.... And it was all too manifest to White also that the last
place in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the
back of his own head.
Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array
of influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of
patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence
of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the
purely personal dissensions between man and man. And he developed a
metaphysical interpretation of these troubles. “No doubt,” he wrote in
one place, “much of the evil between different kinds of men is due to
uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to
bad thinking.” At times he seemed on the verge of the persuasion that
most human trouble is really due to bad metaphysics. It was, one must
remark, an extraordinary journey he had made; he had started from
chivalry and arrived at metaphysics; every knight he held must be a
logician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the mind. One thinks of his
coming to this conclusion with knit brows and balancing intentness
above whole gulfs of bathos--very much as he had once walked the Leysin
Bisse....
“Men do not know how to think,” he insisted--getting along the
planks; “and they will not realize that they do not know how to
think. Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of
misconceptions.... Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the mind,
and muddled thinking as ignoble as dirty conduct.... Infinitely more
disastrous.”
And again he wrote: “Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too
eager to get into action. There is our deepest trouble. He takes
conclusions ready-made, or he makes them in a hurry. Life is so short
that he thinks it better to err than wait. He has no patience, no faith
in anything but himself. He thinks he is a being when in reality he is
only a link in a being, and so he is more anxious to be complete than
right. The last devotion of which he is capable is that devotion of
the mind which suffers partial performance, but insists upon exhaustive
thought. He scamps his thought and finishes his performance, and before
he is dead it is already being abandoned and begun all over again by
some one else in the same egotistical haste....”
It is, I suppose, a part of the general humour of life that these words
should have been written by a man who walked the plank to fresh ideas
with the dizziest difficulty unless he had Prothero to drag him forward,
and who acted time after time with an altogether disastrous hastiness.
2
Yet there was a kind of necessity in this journey of Benham's from the
cocked hat and wooden sword of Seagate and his early shame at cowardice
and baseness to the spiritual megalomania of his complete Research
Magnificent. You can no more resolve to live a life of honour nowadays
and abstain from social and political scheming on a world-wide scale,
than you can profess religion and refuse to think about God. In the past
it was possible to take all sorts of things for granted and be loyal to
unexamined things. One could be loyal to unexamined things because they
were unchallenged things. But now everything is challenged. By the
time of his second visit to Russia, Benham's ideas of conscious
and deliberate aristocracy reaching out to an idea of universal
responsibility had already grown into the extraordinary fantasy that he
was, as it were, an uncrowned king in the world. To be noble is to
be aristocratic, that is to say, a ruler. Thence it follows that
aristocracy is multiple kingship, and to be an aristocrat is to partake
both of the nature of philosopher and king....
Yet it is manifest that the powerful people of this world are by no
means necessarily noble, and that most modern kings, poor in quality,
petty in spirit, conventional in outlook, controlled and limited,
fall far short of kingship. Nevertheless, there IS nobility, there
IS kingship, or this earth is a dustbin and mankind but a kind of
skin-disease upon a planet. From that it is an easy step to this idea,
the idea whose first expression had already so touched the imagination
of Amanda, of a sort of diffused and voluntary kingship scattered
throughout mankind. The aristocrats are not at the high table, the
kings are not enthroned, those who are enthroned are but pretenders and
SIMULACRA, kings of the vulgar; the real king and ruler is every man who
sets aside the naive passions and self-interest of the common life for
the rule and service of the world.
This is an idea that is now to be found in much contemporary writing. It
is one of those ideas that seem to appear simultaneously at many points
in the world, and it is impossible to say now how far Benham was
an originator of this idea, and how far he simply resonated to its
expression by others. It was far more likely that Prothero, getting it
heaven knows where, had spluttered it out and forgotten it, leaving it
to germinate in the mind of his friend....
This lordly, this kingly dream became more and more essential to
Benham as his life went on. When Benham walked the Bisse he was just
a youngster resolved to be individually brave; when he prowled in the
jungle by night he was there for all mankind. With every year he became
more and more definitely to himself a consecrated man as kings are
consecrated. Only that he was self-consecrated, and anointed only in
his heart. At last he was, so to speak, Haroun al Raschid again, going
unsuspected about the world, because the palace of his security would
not tell him the secrets of men's disorders. He was no longer a creature
of circumstances, he was kingly, unknown, Alfred in the Camp of the
Danes. In the great later accumulations of his Research the personal
matter, the introspection, the intimate discussion of motive, becomes
less and less. He forgets himself in the exaltation of kingliness. He
worries less and less over the particular rightness of his
definite acts. In these later papers White found Benham abstracted,
self-forgetful, trying to find out with an ever increased
self-detachment, with an ever deepening regal solicitude, why there are
massacres, wars, tyrannies and persecutions, why we let famine, disease
and beasts assail us, and want dwarf and cripple vast multitudes in the
midst of possible plenty. And when he found out and as far as he found
out, he meant quite simply and earnestly to apply his knowledge....
3
The intellectualism of Benham intensified to the end. His definition of
Prejudice impressed White as being the most bloodless and philosophical
formula that ever dominated the mind of a man.
“Prejudice,” Benham had written, “is that common incapacity of the human
mind to understand that a difference in any respect is not a difference
in all respects, reinforced and rendered malignant by an instinctive
hostility to what is unlike ourselves. We exaggerate classification and
then charge it with mischievous emotion by referring it to ourselves.”
And under this comprehensive formula he proceeded to study and attack
Family Prejudice, National Prejudice, Race Prejudice, War, Class
Prejudice, Professional Prejudice, Sex Prejudice, in the most
industrious and elaborate manner. Whether one regards one's self or
others he held that these prejudices are evil things. “From the point
of view of human welfare they break men up into wars and conflicts,
make them an easy prey to those who trade upon suspicion and hostility,
prevent sane collective co-operations, cripple and embitter life. From
the point of view of personal aristocracy they make men vulgar, violent,
unjust and futile. All the conscious life of the aristocrat must be a
constant struggle against false generalizations; it is as much his duty
to free himself from that as from fear, indulgence, and jealousy; it is
a larger and more elaborate task, but it is none the less cardinal and
essential. Indeed it is more cardinal and essential. The true knight has
to be not only no coward, no self-pamperer, no egotist. He has to be a
philosopher. He has to be no hasty or foolish thinker. His judgment no
more than his courage is to be taken by surprise.
“To subdue fear, desire and jealousy, is the aristocrat's personal
affair, it is his ritual and discipline, like a knight watching his
arms; but the destruction of division and prejudice and all their
forms and establishments, is his real task, that is the common work of
knighthood. It is a task to be done in a thousand ways; one man working
by persuasion, another by example, this one overthrowing some crippling
restraint upon the freedom of speech and the spread of knowledge,
and that preparing himself for a war that will shatter a tyrannous
presumption. Most imaginative literature, all scientific investigation,
all sound criticism, all good building, all good manufacture, all sound
politics, every honesty and every reasoned kindliness contribute to this
release of men from the heat and confusions of our present world.”
It was clear to White that as Benham progressed with this major part of
his research, he was more and more possessed by the idea that he was not
making his own personal research alone, but, side by side with a vast,
masked, hidden and once unsuspected multitude of others; that this great
idea of his was under kindred forms the great idea of thousands, that
it was breaking as the dawn breaks, simultaneously to great numbers of
people, and that the time was not far off when the new aristocracy, the
disguised rulers of the world, would begin to realize their common
bent and effort. Into these latter papers there creeps more and more
frequently a new phraseology, such expressions as the “Invisible King”
and the “Spirit of Kingship,” so that as Benham became personally more
and more solitary, his thoughts became more and more public and social.
Benham was not content to define and denounce the prejudices of mankind.
He set himself to study just exactly how these prejudices worked, to get
at the nature and habits and strengths of each kind of prejudice, and to
devise means for its treatment, destruction or neutralization. He had no
great faith in the power of pure reasonableness; his psychological ideas
were modern, and he had grasped the fact that the power of most of the
great prejudices that strain humanity lies deeper than the intellectual
level. Consequently he sought to bring himself into the closest contact
with prejudices in action and prejudices in conflict in order to
discover their sub-rational springs.
A large proportion of that larger moiety of the material at Westhaven
Street which White from his extensive experience of the public patience
decided could not possibly “make a book,” consisted of notes and
discussions upon the first-hand observations Benham had made in this
or that part of the world. He began in Russia during the revolutionary
trouble of 1906, he went thence to Odessa, and from place to place in
Bessarabia and Kieff, where during a pogrom he had his first really
illuminating encounter with race and culture prejudice. His examination
of the social and political condition of Russia seems to have left him
much more hopeful than was the common feeling of liberal-minded people
during the years of depression that followed the revolution of 1906, and
it was upon the race question that his attention concentrated.
The Swadeshi outbreak drew him from Russia to India. Here in an entirely
different environment was another discord of race and culture, and
he found in his study of it much that illuminated and corrected his
impressions of the Russian issue. A whole drawer was devoted to a
comparatively finished and very thorough enquiry into human dissensions
in lower Bengal. Here there were not only race but culture conflicts,
and he could work particularly upon the differences between men of the
same race who were Hindus, Christians and Mahometans respectively.
He could compare the Bengali Mahometan not only with the Bengali
Brahminist, but also with the Mahometan from the north-west. “If one
could scrape off all the creed and training, would one find much the
same thing at the bottom, or something fundamentally so different that
no close homogeneous social life and not even perhaps a life of just
compromise is possible between the different races of mankind?”
His answer to that was a confident one. “There are no such natural and
unalterable differences in character and quality between any two sorts
of men whatever, as would make their peaceful and kindly co-operation in
the world impossible,” he wrote.
But he was not satisfied with his observations in India. He found the
prevalence of caste ideas antipathetic and complicating. He went on
after his last parting from Amanda into China, it was the first of
several visits to China, and thence he crossed to America. White found a
number of American press-cuttings of a vehemently anti-Japanese quality
still awaiting digestion in a drawer, and it was clear to him that
Benham had given a considerable amount of attention to the development
of the “white” and “yellow” race hostility on the Pacific slope; but his
chief interest at that time had been the negro. He went to Washington
and thence south; he visited Tuskegee and Atlanta, and then went off at
a tangent to Hayti. He was drawn to Hayti by Hesketh Pritchard's vivid
book, WHERE BLACK RULES WHITE, and like Hesketh Pritchard he was able
to visit that wonderful monument to kingship, the hidden fastness of La
Ferriere, the citadel built a century ago by the “Black Napoleon,” the
Emperor Christophe. He went with a young American demonstrator from
Harvard.
4
It was a memorable excursion. They rode from Cap Haytien for a day's
journey along dusty uneven tracks through a steaming plain of luxurious
vegetation, that presented the strangest mixture of unbridled jungle
with populous country. They passed countless villages of thatched huts
alive with curiosity and swarming with naked black children, and yet all
the time they seemed to be in a wilderness. They forded rivers, they had
at times to force themselves through thickets, once or twice they
lost their way, and always ahead of them, purple and sullen, the great
mountain peak with La Ferriere upon its crest rose slowly out of the
background until it dominated the landscape. Long after dark they
blundered upon rather than came to the village at its foot where they
were to pass the night. They were interrogated under a flaring torch by
peering ragged black soldiers, and passed through a firelit crowd into
the presence of the local commandant to dispute volubly about their
right to go further. They might have been in some remote corner of
Nigeria. Their papers, laboriously got in order, were vitiated by the
fact, which only became apparent by degrees, that the commandant could
not read. They carried their point with difficulty.