half-naked negro in a kepi and the remains of a sky-blue pair of
trousers, they explored one of the most exemplary memorials of
imperialism that humanity has ever made. The roads and parks and
prospects constructed by this vanished Emperor of Hayti, had long
since disappeared, and the three men clambered for hours up ravines and
precipitous jungle tracks, occasionally crossing the winding traces of
a choked and ruined road that had once been the lordly approach to his
fastness. Below they passed an abandoned palace of vast extent, a palace
with great terraces and the still traceable outline of gardens, though
there were green things pushing between the terrace steps, and trees
thrust out of the empty windows. Here from a belvedere of which the
skull-like vestige still remained, the negro Emperor Christophe, after
fourteen years of absolute rule, had watched for a time the smoke of the
burning of his cane-fields in the plain below, and then, learning that
his bodyguard had deserted him, had gone in and blown out his brains.
He had christened the place after the best of examples, “Sans Souci.”
But the citadel above, which was to have been his last defence, he never
used. The defection of his guards made him abandon that. To build it,
they say, cost Hayti thirty thousand lives. He had the true Imperial
lavishness. So high it was, so lost in a wilderness of trees and bush,
looking out over a land relapsed now altogether to a barbarism of patch
and hovel, so solitary and chill under the tropical sky--for even the
guards who still watched over its suspected treasures feared to live in
its ghostly galleries and had made hovels outside its walls--and at the
same time so huge and grandiose--there were walls thirty feet thick,
galleries with scores of rust-eaten cannon, circular dining-halls,
king's apartments and queen's apartments, towering battlements and
great arched doorways--that it seemed to Benham to embody the power and
passing of that miracle of human history, tyranny, the helpless bowing
of multitudes before one man and the transitoriness of such glories,
more completely than anything he had ever seen or imagined in the world
before. Beneath the battlements--they are choked above with jungle grass
and tamarinds and many flowery weeds--the precipice fell away a sheer
two thousand feet, and below spread a vast rich green plain populous and
diversified, bounded at last by the blue sea, like an amethystine wall.
Over this precipice Christophe was wont to fling his victims, and below
this terrace were bottle-shaped dungeons where men, broken and torn,
thrust in at the neck-like hole above, starved and died: it was his
headquarters here, here he had his torture chambers and the means for
nameless cruelties....
“Not a hundred years ago,” said Benham's companion, and told the story
of the disgraced favourite, the youth who had offended.
“Leap,” said his master, and the poor hypnotized wretch, after one
questioning glance at the conceivable alternatives, made his last
gesture of servility, and then stood out against the sky, swayed, and
with a convulsion of resolve, leapt and shot headlong down through the
shimmering air.
Came presently the little faint sound of his fall.
The Emperor satisfied turned away, unmindful of the fact that this
projectile he had launched had caught among the bushes below, and
presently struggled and found itself still a living man. It could
scramble down to the road and, what is more wonderful, hope for mercy.
An hour and it stood before Christophe again, with an arm broken and
bloody and a face torn, a battered thing now but with a faint flavour of
pride in its bearing. “Your bidding has been done, Sire,” it said.
“So,” said the Emperor, unappeased. “And you live? Well-- Leap
again....”
And then came other stories. The young man told them as he had heard
them, stories of ferocious wholesale butcheries, of men standing along
the walls of the banqueting chamber to be shot one by one as the feast
went on, of exquisite and terrifying cruelties, and his one note of
wonder, his refrain was, “HERE! Not a hundred years ago.... It makes one
almost believe that somewhere things of this sort are being done now.”
They ate their lunch together amidst the weedy flowery ruins. The
lizards which had fled their coming crept out again to bask in the
sunshine. The soldier-guide and guard scrabbled about with his black
fingers in the ruinous and rifled tomb of Christophe in a search for
some saleable memento....
Benham sat musing in silence. The thought of deliberate cruelty was
always an actual physical distress to him. He sat bathed in the dreamy
afternoon sunlight and struggled against the pictures that crowded
into his mind, pictures of men aghast at death, and of fear-driven men
toiling in agony, and of the shame of extorted obedience and of cringing
and crawling black figures, and the defiance of righteous hate beaten
down under blow and anguish. He saw eyes alight with terror and lips
rolled back in agony, he saw weary hopeless flight before striding proud
destruction, he saw the poor trampled mangled dead, and he shivered in
his soul....
He hated Christophe and all that made Christophe; he hated pride, and
then the idea came to him that it is not pride that makes Christophes
but humility.
There is in the medley of man's composition, deeper far than his
superficial working delusion that he is a separated self-seeking
individual, an instinct for cooperation and obedience. Every natural
sane man wants, though he may want it unwittingly, kingly guidance, a
definite direction for his own partial life. At the bottom of his heart
he feels, even if he does not know it definitely, that his life is
partial. He is driven to join himself on. He obeys decision and the
appearance of strength as a horse obeys its rider's voice. One thinks
of the pride, the uncontrolled frantic will of this black ape of all
Emperors, and one forgets the universal docility that made him possible.
Usurpation is a crime to which men are tempted by human dirigibility.
It is the orderly peoples who create tyrants, and it is not so much
restraint above as stiff insubordination below that has to be taught to
men. There are kings and tyrannies and imperialisms, simply because of
the unkingliness of men.
And as he sat upon the battlements of La Ferriere, Benham cast off from
his mind his last tolerance for earthly kings and existing States, and
expounded to another human being for the first time this long-cherished
doctrine of his of the Invisible King who is the lord of human destiny,
the spirit of nobility, who will one day take the sceptre and rule the
earth.... To the young American's naive American response to any simply
felt emotion, he seemed with his white earnestness and his glowing eyes
a veritable prophet....
“This is the root idea of aristocracy,” said Benham.
“I have never heard the underlying spirit of democracy, the real true
Thing in democracy, so thoroughly expressed,” said the young American.
5
Benham's notes on race and racial cultures gave White tantalizing
glimpses of a number of picturesque experiences. The adventure in Kieff
had first roused Benham to the reality of racial quality. He was caught
in the wheels of a pogrom.
“Before that time I had been disposed to minimize and deny race. I still
think it need not prevent men from the completest social co-operation,
but I see now better than I did how difficult it is for any man to purge
from his mind the idea that he is not primarily a Jew, a Teuton, or a
Kelt, but a man. You can persuade any one in five minutes that he or she
belongs to some special and blessed and privileged sort of human
being; it takes a lifetime to destroy that persuasion. There are these
confounded differences of colour, of eye and brow, of nose or hair,
small differences in themselves except that they give a foothold and
foundation for tremendous fortifications of prejudice and tradition, in
which hostilities and hatreds may gather. When I think of a Jew's nose,
a Chinaman's eyes or a negro's colour I am reminded of that fatal little
pit which nature has left in the vermiform appendix, a thing no use in
itself and of no significance, but a gathering-place for mischief. The
extremest case of race-feeling is the Jewish case, and even here, I am
convinced, it is the Bible and the Talmud and the exertions of those
inevitable professional champions who live upon racial feeling, far more
than their common distinction of blood, which holds this people together
banded against mankind.”
Between the lines of such general propositions as this White read little
scraps of intimation that linked with the things Benham let fall in
Johannesburg to reconstruct the Kieff adventure.
Benham had been visiting a friend in the country on the further side
of the Dnieper. As they drove back along dusty stretches of road amidst
fields of corn and sunflower and through bright little villages, they
saw against the evening blue under the full moon a smoky red glare
rising from amidst the white houses and dark trees of the town. “The
pogrom's begun,” said Benham's friend, and was surprised when Benham
wanted to end a pleasant day by going to see what happens after the
beginning of a pogrom.
He was to have several surprises before at last he left Benham in
disgust and went home by himself.
For Benham, with that hastiness that so flouted his exalted theories,
passed rapidly from an attitude of impartial enquiry to active
intervention. The two men left their carriage and plunged into
the network of unlovely dark streets in which the Jews and traders
harboured.... Benham's first intervention was on behalf of a crouching
and yelping bundle of humanity that was being dragged about and kicked
at a street corner. The bundle resolved itself into a filthy little old
man, and made off with extraordinary rapidity, while Benham remonstrated
with the kickers. Benham's tallness, his very Gentile face, his good
clothes, and an air of tense authority about him had its effect, and
the kickers shuffled off with remarks that were partly apologies. But
Benham's friend revolted. This was no business of theirs.
Benham went on unaccompanied towards the glare of the burning houses.
For a time he watched. Black figures moved between him and the glare,
and he tried to find out the exact nature of the conflict by enquiries
in clumsy Russian. He was told that the Jews had insulted a religious
procession, that a Jew had spat at an ikon, that the shop of a cheating
Jew trader had been set on fire, and that the blaze had spread to the
adjacent group of houses. He gathered that the Jews were running out of
the burning block on the other side “like rats.” The crowd was mostly
composed of town roughs with a sprinkling of peasants. They were
mischievous but undecided. Among them were a number of soldiers, and
he was surprised to see a policemen, brightly lit from head to foot,
watching the looting of a shop that was still untouched by the flames.
He held back some men who had discovered a couple of women's figures
slinking along in the shadow beneath a wall. Behind his remonstrances
the Jewesses escaped. His anger against disorder was growing upon
him....
Late that night Benham found himself the leading figure amidst a party
of Jews who had made a counter attack upon a gang of roughs in a court
that had become the refuge of a crowd of fugitives. Some of the young
Jewish men had already been making a fight, rather a poor and hopeless
fight, from the windows of the house near the entrance of the court, but
it is doubtful if they would have made an effective resistance if it
had not been for this tall excited stranger who was suddenly shouting
directions to them in sympathetically murdered Russian. It was not that
he brought powerful blows or subtle strategy to their assistance, but
that he put heart into them and perplexity into his adversaries because
he was so manifestly non-partizan. Nobody could ever have mistaken
Benham for a Jew. When at last towards dawn a not too zealous governor
called out the troops and began to clear the streets of rioters, Benham
and a band of Jews were still keeping the gateway of that court behind a
hasty but adequate barricade of furniture and handbarrows.
The ghetto could not understand him, nobody could understand him, but it
was clear a rare and precious visitor had come to their rescue, and he
was implored by a number of elderly, dirty, but very intelligent-looking
old men to stay with them and preserve them until their safety was
assured.
They could not understand him, but they did their utmost to entertain
him and assure him of their gratitude. They seemed to consider him as
a representative of the British Government, and foreign intervention on
their behalf is one of those unfortunate fixed ideas that no persecuted
Jews seem able to abandon.
Benham found himself, refreshed and tended, sitting beside a wood fire
in an inner chamber richly flavoured by humanity and listening to a
discourse in evil but understandable German. It was a discourse upon the
wrongs and the greatness of the Jewish people--and it was delivered by
a compact middle-aged man with a big black beard and long-lashed but
animated eyes. Beside him a very old man dozed and nodded approval. A
number of other men crowded the apartment, including several who had
helped to hold off the rioters from the court. Some could follow the
talk and ever again endorsed the speaker in Yiddish or Russian; others
listened with tantalized expressions, their brows knit, their lips
moving.
It was a discourse Benham had provoked. For now he was at the very heart
of the Jewish question, and he could get some light upon the mystery
of this great hatred at first hand. He did not want to hear tales of
outrages, of such things he knew, but he wanted to understand what was
the irritation that caused these things.
So he listened. The Jew dilated at first on the harmlessness and
usefulness of the Jews.
“But do you never take a certain advantage?” Benham threw out.
“The Jews are cleverer than the Russians. Must we suffer for that?”
The spokesman went on to the more positive virtues of his race. Benham
suddenly had that uncomfortable feeling of the Gentile who finds a bill
being made against him. Did the world owe Israel nothing for Philo,
Aron ben Asher, Solomon Gabriol, Halevy, Mendelssohn, Heine, Meyerbeer,
Rubinstein, Joachim, Zangwill? Does Britain owe nothing to Lord
Beaconsfield, Montefiore or the Rothschilds? Can France repudiate her
debt to Fould, Gaudahaux, Oppert, or Germany to Furst, Steinschneider,
Herxheimer, Lasker, Auerbach, Traube and Lazarus and Benfey?...
Benham admitted under the pressure of urgent tones and gestures that
these names did undoubtedly include the cream of humanity, but was it
not true that the Jews did press a little financially upon the inferior
peoples whose lands they honoured in their exile?
The man with the black beard took up the challenge bravely.
“They are merciful creditors,” he said. “And it is their genius to
possess and control. What better stewards could you find for the wealth
of nations than the Jews? And for the honours? That always had been the
role of the Jews--stewardship. Since the days of Joseph in Egypt....”
Then in a lower voice he went on to speak of the deficiencies of the
Gentile population. He wished to be just and generous but the truth was
the truth. The Christian Russians loved drink and laziness; they had no
sense of property; were it not for unjust laws even now the Jews would
possess all the land of South Russia....
Benham listened with a kind of fascination. “But,” he said.
It was so. And with a confidence that aroused a protest or so from the
onlookers, the Jewish apologist suddenly rose up, opened a safe close
beside the fire and produced an armful of documents.
“Look!” he said, “all over South Russia there are these!”
Benham was a little slow to understand, until half a dozen of these
papers had been thrust into his hand. Eager fingers pointed, and several
voices spoke. These things were illegalities that might some day be
legal; there were the records of loans and hidden transactions that
might at any time put all the surrounding soil into the hands of the
Jew. All South Russia was mortgaged....
“But is it so?” asked Benham, and for a time ceased to listen and stared
into the fire.
Then he held up the papers in his hand to secure silence and, feeling
his way in unaccustomed German, began to speak and continued to speak in
spite of a constant insurgent undertone of interruption from the Jewish
spokesman.
All men, Benham said, were brothers. Did they not remember Nathan the
Wise?
“I did not claim him,” said the spokesman, misunderstanding. “He is a
character in fiction.”
But all men are brothers, Benham maintained. They had to be merciful to
one another and give their gifts freely to one another. Also they had
to consider each other's weaknesses. The Jews were probably justified
in securing and administering the property of every community into which
they came, they were no doubt right in claiming to be best fitted for
that task, but also they had to consider, perhaps more than they did,
the feelings and vanities of the host population into which they brought
these beneficent activities. What was said of the ignorance, incapacity
and vice of the Roumanians and Russians was very generally believed and
accepted, but it did not alter the fact that the peasant, for all his
incapacity, did like to imagine he owned his own patch and hovel and did
have a curious irrational hatred of debt....
The faces about Benham looked perplexed.
“THIS,” said Benham, tapping the papers in his hand. “They will not
understand the ultimate benefit of it. It will be a source of anger
and fresh hostility. It does not follow because your race has supreme
financial genius that you must always follow its dictates to the
exclusion of other considerations....”
The perplexity increased.
Benham felt he must be more general. He went on to emphasize the
brotherhood of man, the right to equal opportunity, equal privilege,
freedom to develop their idiosyncrasies as far as possible, unhindered
by the idiosyncrasies of others. He could feel the sympathy and
understanding of his hearers returning. “You see,” said Benham, “you
must have generosity. You must forget ancient scores. Do you not see the
world must make a fresh beginning?”
He was entirely convinced he had them with him. The heads nodded assent,
the bright eyes and lips followed the slow disentanglement of his bad
German.
“Free yourselves and the world,” he said.
Applause.
“And so,” he said breaking unconsciously into English, “let us begin by
burning these BEASTLY mortgages!”
And with a noble and dramatic gesture Benham cast his handful on the
fire. The assenting faces became masks of horror. A score of hands
clutched at those precious papers, and a yell of dismay and anger filled
the room. Some one caught at his throat from behind. “Don't kill him!”
cried some one. “He fought for us!”
6
An hour later Benham returned in an extraordinarily dishevelled
and battered condition to his hotel. He found his friend in anxious
consultation with the hotel proprietor.
“We were afraid that something had happened to you,” said his friend.
“I got a little involved,” said Benham.
“Hasn't some one clawed your cheek?”
“Very probably,” said Benham.
“And torn your coat? And hit you rather heavily upon the neck?”
“It was a complicated misunderstanding,” said Benham. “Oh! pardon! I'm
rather badly bruised upon that arm you're holding.”
7
Benham told the story to White as a jest against himself.
“I see now of course that they could not possibly understand my point of
view,” he said....
“I'm not sure if they quite followed my German....
“It's odd, too, that I remember saying, 'Let's burn these mortgages,'
and at the time I'm almost sure I didn't know the German for
mortgage....”
It was not the only occasion on which other people had failed to
grasp the full intention behind Benham's proceedings. His aristocratic
impulses were apt to run away with his conceptions of brotherhood, and
time after time it was only too manifest to White that Benham's
pallid flash of anger had astonished the subjects of his disinterested
observations extremely. His explorations in Hayti had been terminated
abruptly by an affair with a native policeman that had necessitated the
intervention of the British Consul. It was begun with that suddenness
that was too often characteristic of Benham, by his hitting the
policeman. It was in the main street of Cap Haytien, and the policeman
had just clubbed an unfortunate youth over the head with the heavily
loaded wooden club which is the normal instrument of Haytien discipline.
His blow was a repartee, part of a triangular altercation in which a
large, voluble, mahogany-coloured lady whose head was tied up in a
blue handkerchief played a conspicuous part, but it seemed to Benham an
entirely unjustifiable blow.
He allowed an indignation with negro policemen in general that had been
gathering from the very moment of his arrival at Port-au-Prince to carry
him away. He advanced with the kind of shout one would hurl at a dog,
and smote the policeman to the earth with the stout stick that the
peculiar social atmosphere of Hayti had disposed him to carry. By the
local standard his blow was probably a trivial one, but the moral effect
of his indignant pallor and a sort of rearing tallness about him
on these occasions was always very considerable. Unhappily these
characteristics could have no effect on a second negro policeman who was
approaching the affray from behind, and he felled Benham by a blow on
the shoulder that was meant for the head, and with the assistance of his
colleague overpowered him, while the youth and the woman vanished.
The two officials dragged Benham in a state of vehement protest to the
lock-up, and only there, in the light of a superior officer's superior
knowledge, did they begin to realize the grave fact of his British
citizenship.
The memory of the destruction of the Haytien fleet by a German gunboat
was still vivid in Port-au-Prince, and to that Benham owed it that in
spite of his blank refusal to compensate the man he had knocked over, he
was after two days of anger, two days of extreme insanitary experience,
and much meditation upon his unphilosophical hastiness, released.
Quite a number of trivial incidents of a kindred sort diversified his
enquiries into Indian conditions. They too turned for the most part
on his facile exasperation at any defiance of his deep-felt desire for
human brotherhood. At last indeed came an affair that refused ultimately
to remain trivial, and tangled him up in a coil that invoked newspaper
articles and heated controversies.
The effect of India upon Benham's mind was a peculiar mixture of
attraction and irritation. He was attracted by the Hindu spirit of
intellectualism and the Hindu repudiation of brutality, and he was
infuriated by the spirit of caste that cuts the great world of India
into a thousand futile little worlds, all aloof and hostile one to the
other. “I came to see India,” he wrote, “and there is no India. There is
a great number of Indias, and each goes about with its chin in the air,
quietly scorning everybody else.”
His Indian adventures and his great public controversy on caste began
with a tremendous row with an Indian civil servant who had turned an
Indian gentleman out of his first-class compartment, and culminated in
a disgraceful fracas with a squatting brown holiness at Benares, who had
thrown aside his little brass bowlful of dinner because Benham's shadow
had fallen upon it.
“You unendurable snob!” said Benham, and then lapsing into the forceful
and inadvisable: “By Heaven, you SHALL eat it!...”
8