is the sort of thing one has to stand. Life is imperfect. Nothing can be
done perfectly. And on the whole--” He spoke still more slowly, “I would
go through again with the very same things that have hurt my people. If
I had to live over again. I would try to do the things without hurting
the people, but I would do the things anyhow. Because I'm raw with
remorse, it does not follow that on the whole I am not doing right.
Right doing isn't balm. If I could have contrived not to hurt these
people as I have done, it would have been better, just as it would be
better to win a battle without any killed or wounded. I was clumsy with
them and they suffered, I suffer for their suffering, but still I have
to stick to the way I have taken. One's blunders are accidents. If
one thing is clearer than another it is that the world isn't
accident-proof....
“But I wish I had sent those dollars to Prothero.... God! White, but
I lie awake at night thinking of that messenger as he turned away....
Trying to stop him....
“I didn't send those dollars. So fifty or sixty people were killed
and many wounded.... There for all practical purposes the thing ends.
Perhaps it will serve to give me a little charity for some other fool's
haste and blundering....
“I couldn't help it, White. I couldn't help it....
“The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes on. One thinks, one learns,
one adds one's contribution of experience and understanding. The spirit
of the race goes on to light and comprehension. In spite of accidents.
In spite of individual blundering.
“It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that nobility is so easy as to
come slick and true on every occasion....
“If one gives oneself to any long aim one must reckon with minor
disasters. This Research I undertook grows and grows. I believe in it
more and more. The more it asks from me the more I give to it. When I
was a youngster I thought the thing I wanted was just round the corner.
I fancied I would find out the noble life in a year or two, just what
it was, just where it took one, and for the rest of my life I would live
it. Finely. But I am just one of a multitude of men, each one going a
little wrong, each one achieving a little right. And the noble life is
a long, long way ahead.... We are working out a new way of living for
mankind, a new rule, a new conscience. It's no small job for all of us.
There must be lifetimes of building up and lifetimes of pulling down and
trying again. Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy....
I see myself now for the little workman I am upon this tremendous
undertaking. And all my life hereafter goes to serve it....”
He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend. He spoke with a grim
enthusiasm. “I'm a prig. I'm a fanatic, White. But I have something
clear, something better worth going on with than any adventure of
personal relationship could possibly be....”
And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the faith
that had grown up in his mind. He spoke with a touch of defiance, with
the tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame. “I will
tell you what I believe.”
He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow
development, expansion and complication of his idea of self-respect
until he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he refers
his life to ends and purposes beyond himself. An aristocrat must be
loyal. So it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must also be
lucid; there it is that one has at once the demand for kingship and the
repudiation of all existing states and kings. In this manner he had
come to his idea of a great world republic that must replace the little
warring kingdoms of the present, to the conception of an unseen kingship
ruling the whole globe, to his King Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth
and all sane loyalty. “There,” he said, “is the link of our order, the
new knighthood, the new aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth.
There is our Prince. He is in me, he is in you; he is latent in all
mankind. I have worked this out and tried it and lived it, and I know
that outwardly and inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else be
a poor thing and a base one. On great occasions and small occasions I
have failed myself a thousand times, but no failure lasts if your faith
lasts. What I have learnt, what I have thought out and made sure, I
want now to tell the world. Somehow I will tell it, as a book I suppose,
though I do not know if I shall ever be able to make a book. But I have
away there in London or with me here all the masses of notes I have
made in my search for the life that is worth while living.... We who are
self-appointed aristocrats, who are not ashamed of kingship, must speak
to one another....
“We can have no organization because organizations corrupt....
“No recognition....
“But we can speak plainly....”
(As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and voices
of mounted police riding past the hotel.)
“But on one side your aristocracy means revolution,” said White. “It
becomes a political conspiracy.”
“Manifestly. An open conspiracy. It denies the king upon the stamps and
the flag upon the wall. It is the continual proclamation of the Republic
of Mankind.”
15
The earlier phases of violence in the Rand outbreak in 1913 were
manifest rather in the outskirts of Johannesburg than at the centre.
“Pulling out” was going on first at this mine and then that, there were
riots in Benoni, attacks on strike breakers and the smashing up of
a number of houses. It was not until July the 4th that, with the
suppression of a public meeting in the market-place, Johannesburg itself
became the storm centre.
Benham and White were present at this marketplace affair, a confused
crowded occasion, in which a little leaven of active men stirred through
a large uncertain multitude of decently dressed onlookers. The whole
big square was astir, a swaying crowd of men. A ramshackle platform
improvised upon a trolley struggled through the swarming straw hats to a
street corner, and there was some speaking. At first it seemed as though
military men were using this platform, and then it was manifestly in
possession of an excited knot of labour leaders with red rosettes. The
military men had said their say and got down. They came close by Benham,
pushing their way across the square. “We've warned them,” said one. A
red flag, like some misunderstood remark at a tea-party, was fitfully
visible and incomprehensible behind the platform. Somebody was either
pitched or fell off the platform. One could hear nothing from the
speakers except a minute bleating....
Then there were shouts that the police were charging. A number of
mounted men trotted into the square. The crowd began a series of short
rushes that opened lanes for the passage of the mounted police as they
rode to and fro. These men trotted through the crowd, scattering knots
of people. They carried pick-handles, but they did not seem to be
hitting with them. It became clear that they aimed at the capture of
the trolley. There was only a feeble struggle for the trolley; it was
captured and hauled through the scattered spectators in the square
to the protection of a small impassive body of regular cavalry at the
opposite corner. Then quite a number of people seemed to be getting
excited and fighting. They appeared to be vaguely fighting the
foot-police, and the police seemed to be vaguely pushing through
them and dispersing them. The roof of a little one-story shop became
prominent as a centre of vigorous stone-throwing.
It was no sort of battle. Merely the normal inconsecutiveness of human
affairs had become exaggerated and pugnacious. A meeting was being
prevented, and the police engaged in the operation were being pelted or
obstructed. Mostly people were just looking on.
“It amounts to nothing,” said Benham. “Even if they held a meeting, what
could happen? Why does the Government try to stop it?”
The drifting and charging and a little booing went on for some time.
Every now and then some one clambered to a point of vantage, began
a speech and was pulled down by policemen. And at last across the
confusion came an idea, like a wind across a pond.
The strikers were to go to the Power Station.
That had the effect of a distinct move in the game. The Power Station
was the centre of Johannesburg's light and energy. There if anywhere it
would be possible to express one's disapproval of the administration,
one's desire to embarrass and confute it. One could stop all sorts of
things from the Power Station. At any rate it was a repartee to the
suppression of the meeting. Everybody seemed gladdened by a definite
project.
Benham and White went with the crowd.
At the intersection of two streets they were held up for a time; the
scattered drift of people became congested. Gliding slowly across the
mass came an electric tram, an entirely unbattered tram with even its
glass undamaged, and then another and another. Strikers, with the
happy expression of men who have found something expressive to do, were
escorting the trams off the street. They were being meticulously careful
with them. Never was there less mob violence in a riot. They walked by
the captured cars almost deferentially, like rough men honoured by a
real lady's company. And when White and Benham reached the Power House
the marvel grew. The rioters were already in possession and going freely
over the whole place, and they had injured nothing. They had stopped
the engines, but they had not even disabled them. Here too manifestly a
majority of the people were, like White and Benham, merely lookers-on.
“But this is the most civilized rioting,” said Benham. “It isn't
rioting; it's drifting. Just as things drifted in Moscow. Because nobody
has the rudder....
“What maddens me,” he said, “is the democracy of the whole thing. White!
I HATE this modern democracy. Democracy and inequality! Was there ever
an absurder combination? What is the good of a social order in which the
men at the top are commoner, meaner stuff than the men underneath, the
same stuff, just spoilt, spoilt by prosperity and opportunity and the
conceit that comes with advantage? This trouble wants so little, just
a touch of aristocracy, just a little cultivated magnanimity, just an
inkling of responsibility, and the place might rise instantly out of all
this squalor and evil temper.... What does all this struggle here amount
to? On one side unintelligent greed, unintelligent resentment on the
other; suspicion everywhere....
“And you know, White, at bottom THEY ALL WANT TO BE DECENT!
“If only they had light enough in their brains to show them how.
It's such a plain job they have here too, a new city, the simplest
industries, freedom from war, everything to make a good life for men,
prosperity, glorious sunshine, a kind of happiness in the air. And
mismanagement, fear, indulgence, jealousy, prejudice, stupidity, poison
it all. A squabble about working on a Saturday afternoon, a squabble
embittered by this universal shadow of miner's phthisis that the masters
were too incapable and too mean to prevent.
“Oh, God!” cried Benham, “when will men be princes and take hold of
life? When will the kingship in us wake up and come to its own?... Look
at this place! Look at this place!... The easy, accessible happiness!
The manifest prosperity. The newness and the sunshine. And the silly
bitterness, the rage, the mischief and miseries!...”
And then: “It's not our quarrel....”
“It's amazing how every human quarrel draws one in to take sides.
Life is one long struggle against the incidental. I can feel my anger
gathering against the Government here in spite of my reason. I want to
go and expostulate. I have a ridiculous idea that I ought to go off to
Lord Gladstone or Botha and expostulate.... What good would it do?
They move in the magic circles of their own limitations, an official, a
politician--how would they put it?--'with many things to consider....'
“It's my weakness to be drawn into quarrels. It's a thing I have to
guard against....
“What does it all amount to? It is like a fight between navvies in
a tunnel to settle the position of the Pole star. It doesn't concern
us.... Oh! it doesn't indeed concern us. It's a scuffle in the darkness,
and our business, the business of all brains, the only permanent good
work is to light up the world.... There will be mischief and hatred
here and suppression and then forgetfulness, and then things will go on
again, a little better or a little worse....”
“I'm tired of this place, White, and of all such places. I'm tired of
the shouting and running, the beating and shooting. I'm sick of all the
confusions of life's experience, which tells only of one need amidst an
endless multitude of distresses. I've seen my fill of wars and disputes
and struggles. I see now how a man may grow weary at last of life and
its disorders, its unreal exacting disorders, its blunders and its
remorse. No! I want to begin upon the realities I have made for myself.
For they are the realities. I want to go now to some quiet corner
where I can polish what I have learnt, sort out my accumulations, be
undisturbed by these transitory symptomatic things....
“What was that boy saying? They are burning the STAR office.... Well,
let them....”
And as if to emphasize his detachment, his aversion, from the things
that hurried through the night about them, from the red flare in the
sky and the distant shouts and revolver shots and scuffling flights down
side streets, he began to talk again of aristocracy and the making of
greatness and a new great spirit in men. All the rest of his life, he
said, must be given to that. He would say his thing plainly and honestly
and afterwards other men would say it clearly and beautifully; here it
would touch a man and there it would touch a man; the Invisible King in
us all would find himself and know himself a little in this and a little
in that, and at last a day would come, when fair things and fine things
would rule the world and such squalor as this about them would be as
impossible any more for men as a Stone Age Corroboree....
Late or soon?
Benham sought for some loose large measure of time.
“Before those constellations above us have changed their shapes....
“Does it matter if we work at something that will take a hundred years
or ten thousand years? It will never come in our lives, White. Not soon
enough for that. But after that everything will be soon--when one comes
to death then everything is at one's fingertips--I can feel that greater
world I shall never see as one feels the dawn coming through the last
darkness....”
16
The attack on the Rand Club began while Benham and White were at lunch
in the dining-room at the Sherborough on the day following the burning
of the STAR office. The Sherborough dining-room was on the first floor,
and the Venetian window beside their table opened on to a verandah
above a piazza. As they talked they became aware of an excitement in the
street below, shouting and running and then a sound of wheels and the
tramp of a body of soldiers marching quickly. White stood up and looked.
“They're seizing the stuff in the gunshops,” he said, sitting down
again. “It's amazing they haven't done it before.”
They went on eating and discussing the work of a medical mission at
Mukden that had won Benham's admiration....
A revolver cracked in the street and there was a sound of glass
smashing. Then more revolver shots. “That's at the big club at the
corner, I think,” said Benham and went out upon the verandah.
Up and down the street mischief was afoot. Outside the Rand Club in
the cross street a considerable mass of people had accumulated, and
was being hustled by a handful of khaki-clad soldiers. Down the street
people were looking in the direction of the market-place and then
suddenly a rush of figures flooded round the corner, first a froth
of scattered individuals and then a mass, a column, marching with an
appearance of order and waving a flag. It was a poorly disciplined body,
it fringed out into a swarm of sympathizers and spectators upon the
side walk, and at the head of it two men disputed. They seemed to be
differing about the direction of the whole crowd. Suddenly one smote the
other with his fist, a blow that hurled him sideways, and then turned
with a triumphant gesture to the following ranks, waving his arms in
the air. He was a tall lean man, hatless and collarless, greyhaired and
wild-eyed. On he came, gesticulating gauntly, past the hotel.
And then up the street something happened. Benham's attention was turned
round to it by a checking, by a kind of catch in the breath, on the part
of the advancing procession under the verandah.
The roadway beyond the club had suddenly become clear. Across it a dozen
soldiers had appeared and dismounted methodically and lined out, with
their carbines in readiness. The mounted men at the club corner had
vanished, and the people there had swayed about towards this new
threat. Quite abruptly the miscellaneous noises of the crowd ceased.
Understanding seized upon every one.
These soldiers were going to fire....
The brown uniformed figures moved like automata; the rifle shots rang
out almost in one report....
There was a rush in the crowd towards doorways and side streets, an
enquiring pause, the darting back of a number of individuals into the
roadway and then a derisive shouting. Nobody had been hit. The soldiers
had fired in the air.
“But this is a stupid game,” said Benham. “Why did they fire at all?”
The tall man who had led the mob had run out into the middle of the
road. His commando was a little disposed to assume a marginal position,
and it had to be reassured. He was near enough for Benham to see his
face. For a time it looked anxious and thoughtful. Then he seemed to
jump to his decision. He unbuttoned and opened his coat wide as if
defying the soldiers. “Shoot,” he bawled, “Shoot, if you dare!”
A little uniform movement of the soldiers answered him. The small figure
of the officer away there was inaudible. The coat of the man below
flapped like the wings of a crowing cock before a breast of dirty shirt,
the hoarse voice cracked with excitement, “Shoot, if you dare. Shoot, if
you dare! See!”
Came the metallic bang of the carbines again, and in the instant the
leader collapsed in the road, a sprawl of clothes, hit by half a dozen
bullets. It was an extraordinary effect. As though the figure had been
deflated. It was incredible that a moment before this thing had been a
man, an individual, a hesitating complicated purpose.
“Good God!” cried Benham, “but--this is horrible!”
The heap of garments lay still. The red hand that stretched out towards
the soldiers never twitched.
The spectacular silence broke into a confusion of sounds, women
shrieked, men cursed, some fled, some sought a corner from which they
might still see, others pressed forward. “Go for the swine!” bawled a
voice, a third volley rattled over the heads of the people, and in
the road below a man with a rifle halted, took aim, and answered the
soldiers' fire. “Look out!” cried White who was watching the soldiers,
and ducked. “This isn't in the air!”
Came a straggling volley again, like a man running a metal hammer very
rapidly along iron corrugations, and this time people were dropping all
over the road. One white-faced man not a score of yards away fell with
a curse and a sob, struggled up, staggered for some yards with blood
running abundantly from his neck, and fell and never stirred again.
Another went down upon his back clumsily in the roadway and lay wringing
his hands faster and faster until suddenly with a movement like a sigh
they dropped inert by his side. A straw-hatted youth in a flannel suit
ran and stopped and ran again. He seemed to be holding something red and
strange to his face with both hands; above them his eyes were round
and anxious. Blood came out between his fingers. He went right past
the hotel and stumbled and suddenly sprawled headlong at the opposite
corner. The majority of the crowd had already vanished into doorways and
side streets. But there was still shouting and there was still a remnant
of amazed and angry men in the roadway--and one or two angry women. They
were not fighting. Indeed they were unarmed, but if they had had weapons
now they would certainly have used them.
“But this is preposterous!” cried Benham. “Preposterous. Those soldiers
are never going to shoot again! This must stop.”
He stood hesitating for a moment and then turned about and dashed for
the staircase. “Good Heaven!” cried White. “What are you going to do?”
Benham was going to stop that conflict very much as a man might go to
stop a clock that is striking unwarrantably and amazingly. He was going
to stop it because it annoyed his sense of human dignity.
White hesitated for a moment and then followed, crying “Benham!”
But there was no arresting this last outbreak of Benham's all too
impatient kingship. He pushed aside a ducking German waiter who was
peeping through the glass doors, and rushed out of the hotel. With
a gesture of authority he ran forward into the middle of the street,
holding up his hand, in which he still held his dinner napkin clenched
like a bomb. White believes firmly that Benham thought he would be able
to dominate everything. He shouted out something about “Foolery!”
Haroun al Raschid was flinging aside all this sublime indifference to
current things....
But the carbines spoke again.
Benham seemed to run unexpectedly against something invisible. He
spun right round and fell down into a sitting position. He sat looking
surprised.
After one moment of blank funk White drew out his pocket handkerchief,
held it arm high by way of a white flag, and ran out from the piazza of
the hotel.
17
“Are you hit?” cried White dropping to his knees and making himself as
compact as possible. “Benham!”
Benham, after a moment of perplexed thought answered in a strange voice,
a whisper into which a whistling note had been mixed.
“It was stupid of me to come out here. Not my quarrel. Faults on both
sides. And now I can't get up. I will sit here a moment and pull myself
together. Perhaps I'm--I must be shot. But it seemed to come--inside
me.... If I should be hurt. Am I hurt?... Will you see to that book of
mine, White? It's odd. A kind of faintness.... What?”
“I will see after your book,” said White and glanced at his hand because
it felt wet, and was astonished to discover it bright red. He forgot
about himself then, and the fresh flight of bullets down the street.
The immediate effect of this blood was that he said something more about
the book, a promise, a definite promise. He could never recall his
exact words, but their intention was binding. He conveyed his absolute
acquiescence with Benham's wishes whatever they were. His life for that
moment was unreservedly at his friend's disposal....
White never knew if his promise was heard. Benham had stopped speaking
quite abruptly with that “What?”
He stared in front of him with a doubtful expression, like a man who is
going to be sick, and then, in an instant, every muscle seemed to give
way, he shuddered, his head flopped, and White held a dead man in his
arms.
THE END