his character as to seem almost instinctive. But he had too a very clear
reason for his hostility to all these amazing breaks in human continuity
in his sense of the gathering dangers they now involve. They had always,
he was convinced, meant conflict, hatred, misery and the destruction
of human dignity, but the new conditions of life that have been brought
about by modern science were making them far more dangerous than they
had ever been before. He believed that the evil and horror of war was
becoming more and more tremendous with every decade, and that the free
play of national prejudice and that stupid filching ambitiousness
that seems to be inseparable from monarchy, were bound to precipitate
catastrophe, unless a real international aristocracy could be brought
into being to prevent it.
In the drawer full of papers labelled “Politics,” White found a paper
called “The Metal Beast.” It showed that for a time Benham had been
greatly obsessed by the thought of the armaments that were in those days
piling up in every country in Europe. He had gone to Essen, and at Essen
he had met a German who had boasted of Zeppelins and the great guns that
were presently to smash the effete British fleet and open the Imperial
way to London.
“I could not sleep,” he wrote, “on account of this man and his talk and
the streak of hatred in his talk. He distressed me not because he seemed
exceptional, but because he seemed ordinary. I realized that he was more
human than I was, and that only killing and killing could come out of
such humanity. I thought of the great ugly guns I had seen, and of the
still greater guns he had talked about, and how gloatingly he thought
of the destruction they could do. I felt as I used to feel about that
infernal stallion that had killed a man with its teeth and feet, a
despairing fear, a sense of monstrosity in life. And this creature
who had so disturbed me was only a beastly snuffy little man in an
ill-fitting frock-coat, who laid his knife and fork by their tips on the
edge of his plate, and picked his teeth with gusto and breathed into
my face as he talked to me. The commonest of representative men. I went
about that Westphalian country after that, with the conviction that
headless, soulless, blood-drinking metal monsters were breeding all
about me. I felt that science was producing a poisonous swarm, a nest
of black dragons. They were crouching here and away there in France and
England, they were crouching like beasts that bide their time, mewed
up in forts, kennelled in arsenals, hooded in tarpaulins as hawks are
hooded.... And I had never thought very much about them before, and
there they were, waiting until some human fool like that frock-coated
thing of spite, and fools like him multiplied by a million, saw fit
to call them out to action. Just out of hatred and nationalism and
faction....”
Then came a queer fancy.
“Great guns, mines, battleships, all that cruelty-apparatus; I see it
more and more as the gathering revenge of dead joyless matter for the
happiness of life. It is a conspiracy of the lifeless, an enormous
plot of the rebel metals against sensation. That is why in particular
half-living people seem to love these things. La Ferriere was a fastness
of the kind of tyranny that passes out of human experience, the tyranny
of the strong man over men. Essen comes, the new thing, the tyranny of
the strong machine....
“Science is either slave or master. These people--I mean the German
people and militarist people generally--have no real mastery over the
scientific and economic forces on which they seem to ride. The monster
of steel and iron carries Kaiser and Germany and all Europe captive. It
has persuaded them to mount upon its back and now they must follow the
logic of its path. Whither?... Only kingship will ever master that beast
of steel which has got loose into the world. Nothing but the sense of
unconquerable kingship in us all will ever dare withstand it.... Men
must be kingly aristocrats--it isn't MAY be now, it is MUST be--or,
these confederated metals, these things of chemistry and metallurgy,
these explosives and mechanisms, will trample the blood and life out of
our race into mere red-streaked froth and filth....”
Then he turned to the question of this metallic beast's release. Would
it ever be given blood?
“Men of my generation have been brought up in this threat of a great war
that never comes; for forty years we have had it, so that it is with
a note of incredulity that one tells oneself, 'After all this war may
happen. But can it happen?'”
He proceeded to speculate upon the probability whether a great war would
ever devastate western Europe again, and it was very evident to White
that he wanted very much to persuade himself against that idea. It was
too disagreeable for him to think it probable. The paper was dated 1910.
It was in October, 1914, that White, who was still working upon the
laborious uncertain account of Benham's life and thought he has recently
published, read what Benham had written. Benham concluded that the
common-sense of the world would hold up this danger until reason could
get “to the head of things.”
“There are already mighty forces in Germany,” Benham wrote, “that will
struggle very powerfully to avoid a war. And these forces increase.
Behind the coarseness and the threatenings, the melodrama and the
display of the vulgarer sort there arises a great and noble people.... I
have talked with Germans of the better kind.... You cannot have a whole
nation of Christophes.... There also the true knighthood discovers
itself.... I do not believe this war will overtake us.”
“WELL!” said White.
“I must go back to Germany and understand Germany better,” the notes
went on.
But other things were to hold Benham back from that resolve. Other
things were to hold many men back from similar resolves until it was too
late for them....
“It is preposterous that these monstrous dangers should lower over
Europe, because a certain threatening vanity has crept into the blood of
a people, because a few crude ideas go inadequately controlled.... Does
no one see what that metallic beast will do if they once let it loose?
It will trample cities; it will devour nations....”
White read this on the 9th of October, 1914. One crumpled evening
paper at his feet proclaimed in startled headlines: “Rain of Incendiary
Shells. Antwerp Ablaze.” Another declared untruthfully but impressively:
“Six Zeppelins drop Bombs over the Doomed City.”
He had bought all the evening papers, and had read and re-read them and
turned up maps and worried over strategic problems for which he had no
data at all--as every one did at that time--before he was able to go on
with Benham's manuscripts.
These pacific reassurances seemed to White's war-troubled mind like
finding a flattened and faded flower, a girl's love token, between the
pages of some torn and scorched and blood-stained book picked out from a
heap of loot after rapine and murder had had their fill....
“How can we ever begin over again?” said White, and sat for a long time
staring gloomily into the fire, forgetting forgetting, forgetting too
that men who are tired and weary die, and that new men are born to
succeed them....
“We have to begin over again,” said White at last, and took up Benham's
papers where he had laid them down....
9
One considerable section of Benham's treatment of the Fourth Limitation
was devoted to what he called the Prejudices of Social Position. This
section alone was manifestly expanding into a large treatise upon the
psychology of economic organization....
It was only very slowly that he had come to realize the important part
played by economic and class hostilities in the disordering of
human affairs. This was a very natural result of his peculiar social
circumstances. Most people born to wealth and ease take the established
industrial system as the natural method in human affairs; it is only
very reluctantly and by real feats of sympathy and disinterestedness
that they can be brought to realize that it is natural only in the sense
that it has grown up and come about, and necessary only because nobody
is strong and clever enough to rearrange it. Their experience of it is
a satisfactory experience. On the other hand, the better off one is, the
wider is one's outlook and the more alert one is to see the risks and
dangers of international dissensions. Travel and talk to foreigners open
one's eyes to aggressive possibilities; history and its warnings become
conceivable. It is in the nature of things that socialists and labour
parties should minimize international obligations and necessities, and
equally so that autocracies and aristocracies and plutocracies should be
negligent of and impatient about social reform.
But Benham did come to realize this broader conflict between worker and
director, between poor man and possessor, between resentful humanity and
enterprise, between unwilling toil and unearned opportunity. It is a far
profounder and subtler conflict than any other in human affairs. “I can
foresee a time,” he wrote, “when the greater national and racial hatreds
may all be so weakened as to be no longer a considerable source of human
limitation and misery, when the suspicions of complexion and language
and social habit are allayed, and when the element of hatred and
aggression may be clean washed out of most religious cults, but I do not
begin to imagine a time, because I cannot imagine a method, when there
will not be great friction between those who employ, those who direct
collective action, and those whose part it is to be the rank and file in
industrialism. This, I know, is a limitation upon my confidence due
very largely to the restricted nature of my knowledge of this sort of
organization. Very probably resentment and suspicion in the mass and
self-seeking and dishonesty in the fortunate few are not so deeply
seated, so necessary as they seem to be, and if men can be cheerfully
obedient and modestly directive in war time, there is no reason why
ultimately they should not be so in the business of peace. But I do not
understand the elements of the methods by which this state of affairs
can be brought about.
“If I were to confess this much to an intelligent working man I know
that at once he would answer 'Socialism,' but Socialism is no more a
solution of this problem than eating is a solution when one is lost in
the wilderness and hungry. Of course everybody with any intelligence
wants Socialism, everybody, that is to say, wants to see all human
efforts directed to the common good and a common end, but brought face
to face with practical problems Socialism betrays a vast insufficiency
of practical suggestions. I do not say that Socialism would not work,
but I do say that so far Socialists have failed to convince me that
they could work it. The substitution of a stupid official for a greedy
proprietor may mean a vanished dividend, a limited output and no
other human advantage whatever. Socialism is in itself a mere eloquent
gesture, inspiring, encouraging, perhaps, but beyond that not very
helpful, towards the vast problem of moral and material adjustment
before the race. That problem is incurably miscellaneous and intricate,
and only by great multitudes of generous workers, one working at this
point and one at that, secretly devoted knights of humanity, hidden
and dispersed kings, unaware of one another, doubting each his right
to count himself among those who do these kingly services, is this
elaborate rightening of work and guidance to be done.”
So from these most fundamental social difficulties he came back to his
panacea. All paths and all enquiries led him back to his conception of
aristocracy, conscious, self-disciplined, devoted, self-examining yet
secret, making no personal nor class pretences, as the supreme need not
only of the individual but the world.
10
It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal which had brought the two
schoolfellows together again. White had been on his way to Zimbabwe.
An emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had driven him to seek
consolations in strange scenery and mysterious desolations. It was as if
Zimbabwe called to him. Benham had come to South Africa to see into the
question of Indian immigration, and he was now on his way to meet Amanda
in London. Neither man had given much heed to the gathering social
conflict on the Rand until the storm burst about them. There had been
a few paragraphs in the papers about a dispute upon a point of labour
etiquette, a question of the recognition of Trade Union officials, a
thing that impressed them both as technical, and then suddenly a long
incubated quarrel flared out in rioting and violence, the burning of
houses and furniture, attacks on mines, attempts to dynamite trains.
White stayed in Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded up
country by the railway strike that was among the possibilities of
the situation. Benham stayed because he was going to London very
reluctantly, and he was glad of this justification for a few days'
delay. The two men found themselves occupying adjacent tables in the
Sherborough Hotel, and White was the first to recognize the other. They
came together with a warmth and readiness of intimacy that neither would
have displayed in London.
White had not seen Benham since the social days of Amanda at Lancaster
Gate, and he was astonished at the change a few years had made in him.
The peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair had become more
marked, his skin was deader, his features seemed more prominent and his
expression intenser. His eyes were very bright and more sunken under his
brows. He had suffered from yellow fever in the West Indies, and these
it seemed were the marks left by that illness. And he was much more
detached from the people about him; less attentive to the small
incidents of life, more occupied with inner things. He greeted White
with a confidence that White was one day to remember as pathetic.
“It is good to meet an old friend,” Benham said. “I have lost friends.
And I do not make fresh ones. I go about too much by myself, and I do
not follow the same tracks that other people are following....”
What track was he following? It was now that White first heard of the
Research Magnificent. He wanted to know what Benham was doing, and
Benham after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his interest
in insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions. “It is, of
course, a part of something else,” he amplified. He was writing a book,
“an enormous sort of book.” He laughed with a touch of shyness. It
was about “everything,” about how to live and how not to live. And
“aristocracy, and all sorts of things.” White was always curious about
other people's books. Benham became earnest and more explicit under
encouragement, and to talk about his book was soon to talk about
himself. In various ways, intentionally and inadvertently, he told White
much. These chance encounters, these intimacies of the train and hotel,
will lead men at times to a stark frankness of statement they would
never permit themselves with habitual friends.
About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little,
considering how insistent it was becoming. But the wide propositions
of the Research Magnificent, with its large indifference to immediate
occurrences, its vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted
very sharply in White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and
resentment of the events about them. For him the thought of that first
discussion of this vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was
flowering, and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a
fringe of vivid little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying
on bicycles and afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring
centres of disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, of the
muffled galloping of troops through the broad dusty street in the night,
of groups of men standing and watching down straight broad roads, roads
that ended in groups of chimneys and squat buildings of corrugated iron.
And once there was a marching body of white men in the foreground and a
complicated wire fence, and a clustering mass of Kaffirs watching them
over this fence and talking eagerly amongst themselves.
“All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,”
said Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation....
But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt that
it was more than that. Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that
eventful background while Benham talked to him.
When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the
background the greater share of his attention....
11
It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that the
full values came to very many things that Benham said during these last
conversations. The papers fitted in with his memories of their long
talks like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk had repeated
the private writings in which he had first digested his ideas that it
was presently almost impossible to disentangle what had been said and
understood at Johannesburg from the fuller statement of those patched
and corrected manuscripts. The two things merged in White's mind as he
read. The written text took upon itself a resonance of Benham's
voice; it eked out the hints and broken sentences of his remembered
conversation.
But some things that Benham did not talk about at all, left by their
mere marked absence an impression on White's mind. And occasionally
after Benham had been talking for a long time there would be an
occasional aphasia, such as is often apparent in the speech of men who
restrain themselves from betraying a preoccupation. He would say nothing
about Amanda or about women in general, he was reluctant to speak of
Prothero, and another peculiarity was that he referred perhaps half a
dozen times or more to the idea that he was a “prig.” He seemed to be
defending himself against some inner accusation, some unconquerable
doubt of the entire adventure of his life. These half hints and hints by
omission exercised the quick intuitions of White's mind very keenly, and
he drew far closer to an understanding of Benham's reserves than Benham
ever suspected....
At first after his parting from Amanda in London Benham had felt
completely justified in his treatment of her. She had betrayed him and
he had behaved, he felt, with dignity and self-control. He had no doubt
that he had punished her very effectively, and it was only after he had
been travelling in China with Prothero for some time and in the light
of one or two chance phrases in her letters that he began to have doubts
whether he ought to have punished her at all. And one night at Shanghai
he had a dream in which she stood before him, dishevelled and tearful,
his Amanda, very intensely his Amanda, and said that she was dirty
and shameful and spoilt for ever, because he had gone away from her.
Afterwards the dream became absurd: she showed him the black leopard's
fur as though it was a rug, and it was now moth-eaten and mangey, the
leopard skin that had been so bright and wonderful such a little time
ago, and he awoke before he could answer her, and for a long time he
was full of unspoken answers explaining that in view of her deliberate
unfaithfulness the position she took up was absurd. She had spoilt her
own fur. But what was more penetrating and distressing in this dream was
not so much the case Amanda stated as the atmosphere of unconquerable
intimacy between them, as though they still belonged to each other,
soul to soul, as though nothing that had happened afterwards could have
destroyed their common responsibility and the common interest of their
first unstinted union. She was hurt, and of course he was hurt. He began
to see that his marriage to Amanda was still infinitely more than a
technical bond.
And having perceived that much he presently began to doubt whether she
realized anything of the sort. Her letters fluctuated very much in tone,
but at times they were as detached and guarded as a schoolgirl writing
to a cousin. Then it seemed to Benham an extraordinary fraud on her
part that she should presume to come into his dream with an entirely
deceptive closeness and confidence. She began to sound him in these
latter letters upon the possibility of divorce. This, which he had been
quite disposed to concede in London, now struck him as an outrageous
suggestion. He wrote to ask her why, and she responded exasperatingly
that she thought it was “better.” But, again, why better? It is
remarkable that although his mind had habituated itself to the idea that
Easton was her lover in London, her thought of being divorced, no doubt
to marry again, filled him with jealous rage. She asked him to take
the blame in the divorce proceedings. There, again, he found himself
ungenerous. He did not want to do that. Why should he do that? As a
matter of fact he was by no means reconciled to the price he had paid
for his Research Magnificent; he regretted his Amanda acutely. He was
regretting her with a regret that grew when by all the rules of life it
ought to be diminishing.
It was in consequence of that regret and his controversies with Prothero
while they travelled together in China that his concern about what he
called priggishness arose. It is a concern that one may suppose has a
little afflicted every reasonably self-conscious man who has turned from
the natural passionate personal life to religion or to public service
or any abstract devotion. These things that are at least more extensive
than the interests of flesh and blood have a trick of becoming
unsubstantial, they shine gloriously and inspiringly upon the
imagination, they capture one and isolate one and then they vanish out
of sight. It is far easier to be entirely faithful to friend or lover
than it is to be faithful to a cause or to one's country or to a
religion. In the glow of one's first service that larger idea may be as
closely spontaneous as a handclasp, but in the darkness that comes as
the glow dies away there is a fearful sense of unreality. It was in such
dark moments that Benham was most persecuted by his memories of Amanda
and most distressed by this suspicion that the Research Magnificent was
a priggishness, a pretentious logomachy. Prothero could indeed hint as
much so skilfully that at times the dream of nobility seemed an insult
to the sunshine, to the careless laughter of children, to the good light
in wine and all the warm happiness of existence. And then Amanda would
peep out of the dusk and whisper, “Of course if you could leave me--!
Was I not LIFE? Even now if you cared to come back to me-- For I loved
you best and loved you still, old Cheetah, long after you had left me to
follow your dreams.... Even now I am drifting further into lies and the
last shreds of dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful
leopard I am now, who was once clean and bright.... You could come back,
Cheetah, and you could save me yet. If you would love me....”