the very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that his ear had
loved, and not only could she distress him, but when Benham was in this
heartache mood, when once she had set him going, then his little mother
also would rise against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue eyes
bright with tears; and his frowsty father would back towards him and
sit down complaining that he was neglected, and even little Mrs.
Skelmersdale would reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking after
him as he slunk away from her through Kensington Gardens; indeed every
personal link he had ever had to life could in certain moods pull him
back through the door of self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching
and accusing himself of harshness and self-concentration. The very
kittens of his childhood revived forgotten moments of long-repented
hardness. For a year before Prothero was killed there were these
heartaches. That tragedy gave them their crowning justification. All
these people said in this form or that, “You owed a debt to us, you
evaded it, you betrayed us, you owed us life out of yourself, love and
services, and you have gone off from us all with this life that was
ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of the world,
and with empty phantoms of power and destiny. All this was
intellectualization. You sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind.
There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like you
may lay hold upon. The rule of the world is a fortuitous result of
incalculably multitudinous forces. But all of us you could have made
happier. You could have spared us distresses. Prothero died because of
you. Presently it will be the turn of your father, your mother--Amanda
perhaps....”
He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several memoranda
about priggishness that White read and came near to understanding. In
spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was making up his mind
to be a prig. He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness
against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate
sympathy for Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and
he made his choice. But it was a reluctant choice.
One fragment began in the air. “Of course I had made myself responsible
for her life. But it was, you see, such a confoundedly energetic life,
as vigorous and as slippery as an eel.... Only by giving all my strength
to her could I have held Amanda.... So what was the good of trying to
hold Amanda?...
“All one's people have this sort of claim upon one. Claims made by their
pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and dependences.
You've no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom when
it means snapping and tearing the silly suffering tendrils they have
wrapped about you. The true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp,
enough steadiness, to be kind and right to every human being and still
do the work that ought to be his essential life. I see that now.
It's one of the things this last year or so of loneliness has made me
realize; that in so far as I have set out to live the aristocratic life
I have failed. Instead I've discovered it--and found myself out. I'm an
overstrung man. I go harshly and continuously for one idea. I live as I
ride. I blunder through my fences, I take off too soon. I've no natural
ease of mind or conduct or body. I am straining to keep hold of a thing
too big for me and do a thing beyond my ability. Only after Prothero's
death was it possible for me to realize the prig I have always been,
first as regards him and then as regards Amanda and my mother and every
one. A necessary unavoidable priggishness....” I do not see how
certain things can be done without prigs, people, that is to say, so
concentrated and specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so
resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced.... All things must begin
with clumsiness, there is no assurance about pioneers....
“Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain
aristocracy.... But the very essence of aristocracy, as I conceive it,
is that it does not explain nor talk about itself....
“After all it doesn't matter what I am.... It's just a private vexation
that I haven't got where I meant to get. That does not affect the truth
I have to tell....
“If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one must
speak the truth. I have worked out some very considerable things in my
research, and the time has come when I must set them out clearly and
plainly. That is my job anyhow. My journey to London to release Amanda
will be just the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my real
life. It will release me from my last entanglement with the fellow
creatures I have always failed to make happy.... It's a detail in the
work.... And I shall go on.
“But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical
operation.
“It's very like that. A surgical operation, and when it is over perhaps
I shall think no more about it.
“And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done. So
far I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of living. I
must begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can upon the details,
and, presently, I shall see more clearly where other men are working to
the same ends....”
12
Benham's expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle
between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble life to
the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and sympathy for
the earthliness of that inglorious little don. Although Benham insisted
upon the dominance of life by noble imaginations and relentless
reasonableness, he would never altogether abandon the materialism of
life. Prothero had once said to him, “You are the advocate of the brain
and I of the belly. Only, only we respect each other.” And at another
time, “You fear emotions and distrust sensations. I invite them. You do
not drink gin because you think it would make you weep. But if I could
not weep in any other way I would drink gin.” And it was under
the influence of Prothero that Benham turned from the haughty
intellectualism, the systematized superiorities and refinements, the
caste marks and defensive dignities of India to China, that great
teeming stinking tank of humorous yellow humanity.
Benham had gone to Prothero again after a bout of elevated idealism.
It was only very slowly that he reconciled his mind to the idea of an
entirely solitary pursuit of his aristocratic dream. For some time as
he went about the world he was trying to bring himself into relationship
with the advanced thinkers, the liberal-minded people who seemed to
promise at least a mental and moral co-operation. Yet it is difficult to
see what co-operation was possible unless it was some sort of agreement
that presently they should all shout together. And it was after a
certain pursuit of Rabindranath Tagore, whom he met in Hampstead, that a
horror of perfect manners and perfect finish came upon him, and he fled
from that starry calm to the rich uncleanness of the most undignified
fellow of Trinity. And as an advocate and exponent of the richness of
the lower levels of life, as the declared antagonist of caste and of
the uttermost refinements of pride, Prothero went with Benham by way of
Siberia to the Chinese scene.
Their controversy was perceptible at every dinner-table in their
choice of food and drink. Benham was always wary and Prothero always
appreciative. It peeped out in the distribution of their time, in the
direction of their glances. Whenever women walked about, Prothero gave
way to a sort of ethnological excitement. “That girl--a wonderful racial
type.” But in Moscow he was sentimental. He insisted on going again to
the Cosmopolis Bazaar, and when he had ascertained that Anna Alexievna
had vanished and left no trace he prowled the streets until the small
hours.
In the eastward train he talked intermittently of her. “I should have
defied Cambridge,” he said.
But at every stopping station he got out upon the platform
ethnologically alert....
Theoretically Benham was disgusted with Prothero. Really he was not
disgusted at all. There was something about Prothero like a sparrow,
like a starling, like a Scotch terrier.... These, too, are morally
objectionable creatures that do not disgust....
Prothero discoursed much upon the essential goodness of Russians. He
said they were a people of genius, that they showed it in their faults
and failures just as much as in their virtues and achievements. He
extolled the “germinating disorder” of Moscow far above the “implacable
discipline” of Berlin. Only a people of inferior imagination, a base
materialist people, could so maintain its attention upon precision and
cleanliness. Benham was roused to defence against this paradox. “But all
exaltation neglects,” said Prothero. “No religion has ever boasted that
its saints were spick and span.” This controversy raged between them in
the streets of Irkutsk. It was still burning while they picked their way
through the indescribable filth of Pekin.
“You say that all this is a fine disdain for material things,” said
Benham. “But look out there!”
Apt to their argument a couple of sturdy young women came shuffling
along, cleaving the crowd in the narrow street by virtue of a single
word and two brace of pails of human ordure.
“That is not a fine disdain for material things,” said Benham. “That is
merely individualism and unsystematic living.”
“A mere phase of frankness. Only frankness is left to them now. The
Manchus crippled them, spoilt their roads and broke their waterways.
European intervention paralyses every attempt they make to establish
order on their own lines. In the Ming days China did not reek.... And,
anyhow, Benham, it's better than the silly waste of London....”
And in a little while Prothero discovered that China had tried Benham
and found him wanting, centuries and dynasties ago.
What was this new-fangled aristocratic man, he asked, but the ideal of
Confucius, the superior person, “the son of the King”? There you had the
very essence of Benham, the idea of self-examination, self-preparation
under a vague Theocracy. (“Vaguer,” said Benham, “for the Confucian
Heaven could punish and reward.”) Even the elaborate sham modesty of the
two dreams was the same. Benham interrupted and protested with heat. And
this Confucian idea of the son of the King, Prothero insisted, had been
the cause of China's paralysis. “My idea of nobility is not traditional
but expectant,” said Benham. “After all, Confucianism has held together
a great pacific state far longer than any other polity has ever lasted.
I'll accept your Confucianism. I've not the slightest objection to
finding China nearer salvation than any other land. Do but turn it round
so that it looks to the future and not to the past, and it will be the
best social and political culture in the world. That, indeed, is what
is happening. Mix Chinese culture with American enterprise and you will
have made a new lead for mankind.”
From that Benham drove on to discoveries. “When a man thinks of the past
he concentrates on self; when he thinks of the future he radiates from
self. Call me a neo-Confucian; with the cone opening forward away from
me, instead of focussing on me....”
“You make me think of an extinguisher,” said Prothero.
“You know I am thinking of a focus,” said Benham. “But all your thought
now has become caricature.... You have stopped thinking. You are
fighting after making up your mind....”
Prothero was a little disconcerted by Benham's prompt endorsement of his
Chinese identification. He had hoped it would be exasperating. He tried
to barb his offence. He amplified the indictment. All cultures must
be judged by their reaction and fatigue products, and Confucianism had
produced formalism, priggishness, humbug.... No doubt its ideals had had
their successes; they had unified China, stamped the idea of universal
peace and good manners upon the greatest mass of population in the
world, paved the way for much beautiful art and literature and living.
“But in the end, all your stern orderliness, Benham,” said Prothero,
“only leads to me. The human spirit rebels against this everlasting
armour on the soul. After Han came T'ang. Have you never read Ling Po?
There's scraps of him in English in that little book you have--what is
it?--the LUTE OF JADE? He was the inevitable Epicurean; the Omar Khayyam
after the Prophet. Life must relax at last....”
“No!” cried Benham. “If it is traditional, I admit, yes; but if it is
creative, no....”
Under the stimulation of their undying controversy Benham was driven to
closer enquiries into Chinese thought. He tried particularly to get to
mental grips with English-speaking Chinese. “We still know nothing of
China,” said Prothero. “Most of the stuff we have been told about this
country is mere middle-class tourists' twaddle. We send merchants from
Brixton and missionaries from Glasgow, and what doesn't remind them of
these delectable standards seems either funny to them or wicked. I admit
the thing is slightly pot-bound, so to speak, in the ancient characters
and the ancient traditions, but for all that, they KNOW, they HAVE, what
all the rest of the world has still to find and get. When they begin to
speak and write in a modern way and handle modern things and break into
the soil they have scarcely touched, the rest of the world will find
just how much it is behind.... Oh! not soldiering; the Chinese are not
such fools as that, but LIFE....”
Benham was won to a half belief in these assertions.
He came to realize more and more clearly that while India dreams or
wrestles weakly in its sleep, while Europe is still hopelessly and
foolishly given over to militant monarchies, racial vanities, delirious
religious feuds and an altogether imbecile fumbling with loaded
guns, China, even more than America, develops steadily into a massive
possibility of ordered and aristocratic liberalism....
The two men followed their associated and disconnected paths. Through
Benham's chance speeches and notes, White caught glimpses, as one might
catch glimpses through a moving trellis, of that bilateral adventure. He
saw Benham in conversation with liberal-minded mandarins, grave-faced,
bald-browed persons with disciplined movements, who sat with their hands
thrust into their sleeves talking excellent English; while Prothero
pursued enquiries of an intenser, more recondite sort with gentlemen of
a more confidential type. And, presently, Prothero began to discover and
discuss the merits of opium.
For if one is to disavow all pride and priggishness, if one is to
find the solution of life's problem in the rational enjoyment of one's
sensations, why should one not use opium? It is art materialized.
It gives tremendous experiences with a minimum of exertion, and if
presently its gifts diminish one need but increase the quantity.
Moreover, it quickens the garrulous mind, and steadies the happiness of
love. Across the varied adventures of Benham's journey in China fell the
shadow first of a suspicion and then of a certainty....
The perfected and ancient vices of China wrapped about Prothero like
some tainted but scented robe, and all too late Benham sought to drag
him away. And then in a passion of disgust turned from him.
“To this,” cried Benham, “one comes! Save for pride and fierceness!”
“Better this than cruelty,” said Prothero talking quickly and clearly
because of the evil thing in his veins. “You think that you are the only
explorer of life, Benham, but while you toil up the mountains I board
the house-boat and float down the stream. For you the stars, for me the
music and the lanterns. You are the son of a mountaineering don, and I
am a Chinese philosopher of the riper school. You force yourself beyond
fear of pain, and I force myself beyond fear of consequences. What
are we either of us but children groping under the black cloak of our
Maker?--who will not blind us with his light. Did he not give us also
these lusts, the keen knife and the sweetness, these sensations that are
like pineapple smeared with saltpetre, like salted olives from heaven,
like being flayed with delight.... And did he not give us dreams
fantastic beyond any lust whatever? What is the good of talking? Speak
to your own kind. I have gone, Benham. I am lost already. There is
no resisting any more, since I have drugged away resistance. Why then
should I come back? I know now the symphonies of the exalted nerves; I
can judge; and I say better lie and hear them to the end than come back
again to my old life, to my little tin-whistle solo, my--effort! My
EFFORT!... I ruin my body. I know. But what of that?... I shall soon be
thin and filthy. What of the grape-skin when one has had the pulp?”
“But,” said Benham, “the cleanness of life!”
“While I perish,” said Prothero still more wickedly, “I say good
things....”
13
White had a vision of a great city with narrow crowded streets, hung
with lank banners and gay with vertical vermilion labels, and of a
pleasant large low house that stood in a garden on a hillside, a garden
set with artificial stones and with beasts and men and lanterns of white
porcelain, a garden which overlooked this city. Here it was that Benham
stayed and talked with his host, a man robed in marvellous silks and
subtle of speech even in the European languages he used, and meanwhile
Prothero, it seemed, had gone down into the wickedness of the town
below. It was a very great town indeed, spreading for miles along the
banks of a huge river, a river that divided itself indolently into three
shining branches so as to make islands of the central portion of the
place. And on this river swarmed for ever a vast flotilla of ships and
boats, boats in which people lived, boats in which they sought pleasure,
moored places of assembly, high-pooped junks, steamboats, passenger
sampans, cargo craft, such a water town in streets and lanes, endless
miles of it, as no other part of the world save China can display. In
the daylight it was gay with countless sunlit colours embroidered upon
a fabric of yellow and brown, at night it glittered with a hundred
thousand lights that swayed and quivered and were reflected quiveringly
upon the black flowing waters.
And while Benham sat and talked in the garden above came a messenger who
was for some reason very vividly realized by White's imagination. He was
a tall man with lack-lustre eyes and sunken cheeks that made his cheek
bones very prominent, and gave his thin-lipped mouth something of the
geniality of a skull, and the arm he thrust out of his yellow robe to
hand Prothero's message to Benham was lean as a pole. So he stood out in
White's imagination, against the warm afternoon sky and the brown roofs
and blue haze of the great town below, and was with one exception the
distinctest thing in the story. The message he bore was scribbled by
Prothero himself in a nerveless scrawl: “Send a hundred dollars by this
man. I am in a frightful fix.”
Now Benham's host had been twitting him with the European patronage of
opium, and something in this message stirred his facile indignation.
Twice before he had had similar demands. And on the whole they had
seemed to him to be unreasonable demands. He was astonished that while
he was sitting and talking of the great world-republic of the future and
the secret self-directed aristocracy that would make it possible,
his own friend, his chosen companion, should thus, by this inglorious
request and this ungainly messenger, disavow him. He felt a wave of
intense irritation.
“No,” he said, “I will not.”
And he was too angry to express himself in any language understandable
by his messenger.
His host intervened and explained after a few questions that the
occasion was serious. Prothero, it seemed, had been gambling.
“No,” said Benham. “He is shameless. Let him do what he can.”
The messenger was still reluctant to go.
And scarcely had he gone before misgivings seized Benham.
“Where IS your friend?” asked the mandarin.
“I don't know,” said Benham.
“But they will keep him! They may do all sorts of things when they find
he is lying to them.”
“Lying to them?”
“About your help.”
“Stop that man,” cried Benham suddenly realizing his mistake. But
when the servants went to stop the messenger their intentions were
misunderstood, and the man dashed through the open gate of the garden
and made off down the winding road.
“Stop him!” cried Benham, and started in pursuit, suddenly afraid for
Prothero.
The Chinese are a people of great curiosity, and a small pebble
sometimes starts an avalanche....
White pieced together his conception of the circles of disturbance that
spread out from Benham's pursuit of Prothero's flying messenger.
For weeks and months the great town had been uneasy in all its ways
because of the insurgent spirits from the south and the disorder from
the north, because of endless rumours and incessant intrigue. The stupid
manoeuvres of one European “power” against another, the tactlessness of
missionaries, the growing Chinese disposition to meet violence and force
with violence and force, had fermented and brewed the possibility of an
outbreak. The sudden resolve of Benham to get at once to Prothero was
like the firing of a mine. This tall, pale-faced, incomprehensible
stranger charging through the narrow streets that led to the
pleasure-boats in the south river seemed to many a blue-clad citizen
like the White Peril embodied. Behind him came the attendants of
the rich man up the hill; but they surely were traitors to help this
stranger.
Before Benham could at all realize what was happening he found his way
to the river-boat on which he supposed Prothero to be detained, barred
by a vigorous street fight. Explanations were impossible; he joined in
the fight.
For three days that fight developed round the mystery of Prothero's
disappearance.
It was a complicated struggle into which the local foreign traders
on the river-front and a detachment of modern drilled troops from the
up-river barracks were presently drawn. It was a struggle that was never
clearly explained, and at the end of it they found Prothero's body flung
out upon a waste place near a little temple on the river bank, stabbed
while he was asleep....
And from the broken fragments of description that Benham let fall, White
had an impression of him hunting for all those three days through the
strange places of a Chinese city, along narrow passages, over queer
Venetian-like bridges, through the vast spaces of empty warehouses, in
the incense-scented darkness of temple yards, along planks that passed
to the dark hulls of secret barges, in quick-flying boats that slipped
noiselessly among the larger craft, and sometimes he hunted alone,
sometimes in company, sometimes black figures struggled in the darkness
against dim-lit backgrounds and sometimes a swarm of shining yellow
faces screamed and shouted through the torn paper windows.... And
then at the end of this confused effect of struggle, this Chinese
kinematograph film, one last picture jerked into place and stopped and
stood still, a white wall in the sunshine come upon suddenly round a
corner, a dirty flagged passage and a stiff crumpled body that had for
the first time an inexpressive face....
14
Benham sat at a table in the smoking-room of the Sherborough Hotel
at Johannesburg and told of these things. White watched him from an
armchair. And as he listened he noted again the intensification of
Benham's face, the darkness under his brows, the pallor of his skin, the
touch of red in his eyes. For there was still that red gleam in Benham's
eyes; it shone when he looked out of a darkness into a light. And he
sat forward with his arms folded under him, or moved his long lean hand
about over the things on the table.
“You see,” he said, “this is a sort of horror in my mind. Things like
this stick in my mind. I am always seeing Prothero now, and it will take
years to get this scar off my memory again. Once before--about a horse,
I had the same kind of distress. And it makes me tender, sore-minded
about everything. It will go, of course, in the long run, and it's just
like any other ache that lays hold of one. One can't cure it. One has to
get along with it....
“I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, but how was I to know
then that it was so imperative to send that money?...
“At the time it seemed just pandering to his vices....
“I was angry. I shall never subdue that kind of hastiness altogether.
It takes me by surprise. Before the messenger was out of sight I had
repented....
“I failed him. I have gone about in the world dreaming of tremendous
things and failing most people. My wife too....”
He stopped talking for a little time and folded his arms tight and
stared hard in front of himself, his lips compressed.