Chapter 12

In Chichester he found a little green-bound REPUBLIC in a second-hand book-shop near the Cathedral, but there was no copy of the LAWS to be found in the place. Then he was taken with the brilliant idea of sleeping the night in Chichester and going back next day via Harting to Petersfield station and London. He carried out this scheme and got to South Harting neatly about four o'clock in the afternoon. He found Mrs. Wilder and Mrs. Morris and Amanda and the dogs entertaining Mr. Rathbone-Sanders at tea, and they all seemed a little surprised, and, except Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, they all seemed pleased to see him again so soon. His explanation of why he hadn't gone back to London from Chichester struck him as a little unconvincing in the cold light of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders' eye. But Amanda was manifestly excited by his return, and he told them his impressions of Chichester and described the entertainment of the evening guest at a country inn and suddenly produced his copy of the REPUBLIC. “I found this in a book-shop,” he said, “and I brought it for you, because it describes one of the best dreams of aristocracy there has ever been dreamt.”

At first she praised it as a pretty book in the dearest little binding, and then realized that there were deeper implications, and became grave and said she would read it through and through, she loved such speculative reading.

She came to the door with the others and stayed at the door after they had gone in again. When he looked back at the corner of the road to Petersfield she was still at the door and waved farewell to him.

He only saw a light slender figure, but when she came back into the sitting-room Mr. Rathbone-Sanders noted the faint flush in her cheek and an unwonted abstraction in her eye.

And in the evening she tucked her feet up in the armchair by the lamp and read the REPUBLIC very intently and very thoughtfully, occasionally turning over a page.

5

When Benham got back to London he experienced an unwonted desire to perform his social obligations to the utmost.

So soon as he had had some dinner at his club he wrote his South Harting friends a most agreeable letter of thanks for their kindness to him. In a little while he hoped he should see them again. His mother, too, was most desirous to meet them.... That done, he went on to his flat and to various aspects of life for which he was quite unprepared.

But here we may note that Amanda answered him. Her reply came some four days later. It was written in a square schoolgirl hand, it covered three sheets of notepaper, and it was a very intelligent essay upon the REPUBLIC of Plato. “Of course,” she wrote, “the Guardians are inhuman, but it was a glorious sort of inhumanity. They had a spirit--like sharp knives cutting through life.”

It was her best bit of phrasing and it pleased Benham very much. But, indeed, it was not her own phrasing, she had culled it from a disquisition into which she had led Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, and she had sent it to Benham as she might have sent him a flower.

6

Benham re-entered the flat from which he had fled so precipitately with three very definite plans in his mind. The first was to set out upon his grand tour of the world with as little delay as possible, to shut up this Finacue Street establishment for a long time, and get rid of the soul-destroying perfections of Merkle. The second was to end his ill-advised intimacy with little Mrs. Skelmersdale as generously and cheerfully as possible. The third was to bring Lady Marayne into social relations with the Wilder and Morris MENAGE at South Harting. It did not strike him that there was any incompatibility among these projects or any insurmountable difficulty in any of them until he was back in his flat.

The accumulation of letters, packages and telephone memoranda upon his desk included a number of notes and slips to remind him that both Mrs. Skelmersdale and his mother were ladies of some determination. Even as he stood turning over the pile of documents the mechanical vehemence of the telephone filled him with a restored sense of the adverse will in things. “Yes, mam,” he heard Merkle's voice, “yes, mam. I will tell him, mam. Will you keep possession, mam.” And then in the doorway of the study, “Mrs. Skelmersdale, sir. Upon the telephone, sir.”

Benham reflected with various notes in his hand. Then he went to the telephone.

“You Wicked Boy, where have you been hiding?”

“I've been away. I may have to go away again.”

“Not before you have seen me. Come round and tell me all about it.”

Benham lied about an engagement.

“Then to-morrow in the morning.”... Impossible.

“In the afternoon. You don't WANT to see me.” Benham did want to see her.

“Come round and have a jolly little evening to-morrow night. I've got some more of that harpsichord music. And I'm dying to see you. Don't you understand?”

Further lies. “Look here,” said Benham, “can you come and have a talk in Kensington Gardens? You know the place, near that Chinese garden. Paddington Gate....”

The lady's voice fell to flatness. She agreed. “But why not come to see me HERE?” she asked.

Benham hung up the receiver abruptly.

He walked slowly back to his study. “Phew!” he whispered to himself. It was like hitting her in the face. He didn't want to be a brute, but short of being a brute there was no way out for him from this entanglement. Why, oh! why the devil had he gone there to lunch?...

He resumed his examination of the waiting letters with a ruffled mind. The most urgent thing about them was the clear evidence of gathering anger on the part of his mother. He had missed a lunch party at Sir Godfrey's on Tuesday and a dinner engagement at Philip Magnet's, quite an important dinner in its way, with various promising young Liberals, on Wednesday evening. And she was furious at “this stupid mystery. Of course you're bound to be found out, and of course there will be a scandal.”... He perceived that this last note was written on his own paper. “Merkle!” he cried sharply.

“Yessir!”

Merkle had been just outside, on call.

“Did my mother write any of these notes here?” he asked.

“Two, sir. Her ladyship was round here three times, sir.”

“Did she see all these letters?”

“Not the telephone calls, sir. I 'ad put them on one side. But.... It's a little thing, sir.”

He paused and came a step nearer. “You see, sir,” he explained with the faintest flavour of the confidential softening his mechanical respect, “yesterday, when 'er ladyship was 'ere, sir, some one rang up on the telephone--”

“But you, Merkle--”

“Exactly, sir. But 'er ladyship said 'I'LL go to that, Merkle,' and just for a moment I couldn't exactly think 'ow I could manage it, sir, and there 'er ladyship was, at the telephone. What passed, sir, I couldn't 'ear. I 'eard her say, 'Any message?' And I FANCY, sir, I 'eard 'er say, 'I'm the 'ousemaid,' but that, sir, I think must have been a mistake, sir.”

“Must have been,” said Benham. “Certainly--must have been. And the call you think came from--?”

“There again, sir, I'm quite in the dark. But of course, sir, it's usually Mrs. Skelmersdale, sir. Just about her time in the afternoon. On an average, sir....”

7

“I went out of London to think about my life.”

It was manifest that Lady Marayne did not believe him.

“Alone?” she asked.

“Of course alone.”

“STUFF!” said Lady Marayne.

She had taken him into her own little sitting-room, she had thrown aside gloves and fan and theatre wrap, curled herself comfortably into the abundantly cushioned corner by the fire, and proceeded to a mixture of cross-examination and tirade that he found it difficult to make head against. She was vibrating between distressed solicitude and resentful anger. She was infuriated at his going away and deeply concerned at what could have taken him away. “I was worried,” he said. “London is too crowded to think in. I wanted to get myself alone.”

“And there I was while you were getting yourself alone, as you call it, wearing my poor little brains out to think of some story to tell people. I had to stuff them up you had a sprained knee at Chexington, and for all I knew any of them might have been seeing you that morning. Besides what has a boy like you to worry about? It's all nonsense, Poff.”

She awaited his explanations. Benham looked for a moment like his father.

“I'm not getting on, mother,” he said. “I'm scattering myself. I'm getting no grip. I want to get a better hold upon life, or else I do not see what is to keep me from going to pieces--and wasting existence. It's rather difficult sometimes to tell what one thinks and feels--”

She had not really listened to him.

“Who is that woman,” she interrupted suddenly, “Mrs. Fly-by-Night, or some such name, who rings you up on the telephone?”

Benham hesitated, blushed, and regretted it.

“Mrs. Skelmersdale,” he said after a little pause.

“It's all the same. Who is she?”

“She's a woman I met at a studio somewhere, and I went with her to one of those Dolmetsch concerts.”

He stopped.

Lady Marayne considered him in silence for a little while. “All men,” she said at last, “are alike. Husbands, sons and brothers, they are all alike. Sons! One expects them to be different. They aren't different. Why should they be? I suppose I ought to be shocked, Poff. But I'm not. She seems to be very fond of you.”

“She's--she's very good--in her way. She's had a difficult life....”

“You can't leave a man about for a moment,” Lady Marayne reflected. “Poff, I wish you'd fetch me a glass of water.”

When he returned she was looking very fixedly into the fire. “Put it down,” she said, “anywhere. Poff! is this Mrs. Helter-Skelter a discreet sort of woman? Do you like her?” She asked a few additional particulars and Benham made his grudging admission of facts. “What I still don't understand, Poff, is why you have been away.”

“I went away,” said Benham, “because I want to clear things up.”

“But why? Is there some one else?”

“No.”

“You went alone? All the time?”

“I've told you I went alone. Do you think I tell you lies, mother?”

“Everybody tells lies somehow,” said Lady Marayne. “Easy lies or stiff ones. Don't FLOURISH, Poff. Don't start saying things like a moral windmill in a whirlwind. It's all a muddle. I suppose every one in London is getting in or out of these entanglements--or something of the sort. And this seems a comparatively slight one. I wish it hadn't happened. They do happen.”

An expression of perplexity came into her face. She looked at him. “Why do you want to throw her over?”

“I WANT to throw her over,” said Benham.

He stood up and went to the hearthrug, and his mother reflected that this was exactly what all men did at just this phase of a discussion. Then things ceased to be sensible.

From overhead he said to her: “I want to get away from this complication, this servitude. I want to do some--some work. I want to get my mind clear and my hands clear. I want to study government and the big business of the world.”

“And she's in the way?”

He assented.

“You men!” said Lady Marayne after a little pause. “What queer beasts you are! Here is a woman who is kind to you. She's fond of you. I could tell she's fond of you directly I heard her. And you amuse yourself with her. And then it's Gobble, Gobble, Gobble, Great Work, Hands Clear, Big Business of the World. Why couldn't you think of that before, Poff? Why did you begin with her?”

“It was unexpected....”

“STUFF!” said Lady Marayne for a second time. “Well,” she said, “well. Your Mrs. Fly-by-Night,--oh it doesn't matter!--whatever she calls herself, must look after herself. I can't do anything for her. I'm not supposed even to know about her. I daresay she'll find her consolations. I suppose you want to go out of London and get away from it all. I can help you there, perhaps. I'm tired of London too. It's been a tiresome season. Oh! tiresome and disappointing! I want to go over to Ireland and travel about a little. The Pothercareys want us to come. They've asked us twice....”

Benham braced himself to face fresh difficulties. It was amazing how different the world could look from his mother's little parlour and from the crest of the North Downs.

“But I want to start round the world,” he cried with a note of acute distress. “I want to go to Egypt and India and see what is happening in the East, all this wonderful waking up of the East, I know nothing of the way the world is going--...”

“India!” cried Lady Marayne. “The East. Poff, what is the MATTER with you? Has something happened--something else? Have you been having a love affair?--a REAL love affair?”

“Oh, DAMN love affairs!” cried Benham. “Mother!--I'm sorry, mother! But don't you see there's other things in the world for a man than having a good time and making love. I'm for something else than that. You've given me the splendidest time--...”

“I see,” cried Lady Marayne, “I see. I've bored you. I might have known I should have bored you.”

“You've NOT bored me!” cried Benham.

He threw himself on the rug at her feet. “Oh, mother!” he said, “little, dear, gallant mother, don't make life too hard for me. I've got to do my job, I've got to find my job.”

“I've bored you,” she wept.

Suddenly she was weeping with all the unconcealed distressing grief of a disappointed child. She put her pretty be-ringed little hands in front of her face and recited the accumulation of her woes.

“I've done all I can for you, planned for you, given all my time for you and I've BORED you.”

“Mother!”

“Don't come near me, Poff! Don't TOUCH me! All my plans. All my ambitions. Friends--every one. You don't know all I've given up for you....”

He had never seen his mother weep before. Her self-abandonment amazed him. Her words were distorted by her tears. It was the most terrible and distressing of crises....

“Go away from me! How can you help me? All I've done has been a failure! Failure! Failure!”

8

That night the silences of Finacue Street heard Benham's voice again. “I must do my job,” he was repeating, “I must do my job. Anyhow....”

And then after a long pause, like a watchword and just a little unsurely: “Aristocracy....”

The next day his resolution had to bear the brunt of a second ordeal. Mrs. Skelmersdale behaved beautifully and this made everything tormentingly touching and difficult. She convinced him she was really in love with him, and indeed if he could have seen his freshness and simplicity through her experienced eyes he would have known there was sound reason why she should have found him exceptional. And when his clumsy hints of compensation could no longer be ignored she treated him with a soft indignation, a tender resentment, that left him soft and tender. She looked at him with pained eyes and a quiver of the lips. What did he think she was? And then a little less credibly, did he think she would have given herself to him if she hadn't been in love with him? Perhaps that was not altogether true, but at any rate it was altogether true to her when she said it, and it was manifest that she did not for a moment intend him to have the cheap consolation of giving her money. But, and that seemed odd to Benham, she would not believe, just as Lady Marayne would not believe, that there was not some other woman in the case. He assured her and she seemed reassured, and then presently she was back at exactly the same question. Would no woman ever understand the call of Asia, the pride of duty, the desire for the world?

One sort of woman perhaps....

It was odd that for the first time now, in the sunshine of Kensington Gardens, he saw the little gossamer lines that tell that thirty years and more have passed over a face, a little wrinkling of the eyelids, a little hardening of the mouth. How slight it is, how invisible it has been, how suddenly it appears! And the sunshine of the warm April afternoon, heightened it may be by her determined unmercenary pose, betrayed too the faintest hint of shabbiness in her dress. He had never noticed these shadows upon her or her setting before and their effect was to fill him with a strange regretful tenderness....

Perhaps men only begin to love when they cease to be dazzled and admire. He had thought she might reproach him, he had felt and feared she might set herself to stir his senses, and both these expectations had been unjust to her he saw, now that he saw her beside him, a brave, rather ill-advised and unlucky little struggler, stung and shamed. He forgot the particulars of that first lunch of theirs together and he remembered his mother's second contemptuous “STUFF!”

Indeed he knew now it had not been unexpected. Why hadn't he left this little sensitive soul and this little sensitive body alone? And since he hadn't done so, what right had he now to back out of their common adventure? He felt a sudden wild impulse to marry Mrs. Skelmersdale, in a mood between remorse and love and self-immolation, and then a sunlit young woman with a leaping stride in her paces, passed across his heavens, pointing to Asia and Utopia and forbidding even another thought of the banns....

“You will kiss me good-bye, dear, won't you?” said Mrs. Skelmersdale, brimming over. “You will do that.”

He couldn't keep his arm from her little shoulders. And as their lips touched he suddenly found himself weeping also....

His spirit went limping from that interview. She chose to stay behind in her chair and think, she said, and each time he turned back she was sitting in the same attitude looking at him as he receded, and she had one hand on the chair back and her arm drawn up to it. The third time he waved his hat clumsily, and she started and then answered with her hand. Then the trees hid her....

This sex business was a damnable business. If only because it made one hurt women....

He had trampled on Mrs. Skelmersdale, he had hurt and disappointed his mother. Was he a brute? Was he a cold-blooded prig? What was this aristocracy? Was his belief anything more than a theory? Was he only dreaming of a debt to the men in the quarry, to the miners, to the men in the stokeholes, to the drudges on the fields? And while he dreamt he wounded and distressed real living creatures in the sleep-walk of his dreaming....

So long as he stuck to his dream he must at any rate set his face absolutely against the establishment of any further relations with women.

Unless they were women of an entirely different type, women hardened and tempered, who would understand.

9

So Benham was able to convert the unfortunate Mrs. Skelmersdale into a tender but for a long time an entirely painful memory. But mothers are not so easily disposed of, and more particularly a mother whose conduct is coloured deeply by an extraordinary persuasion of having paid for her offspring twice over. Nolan was inexplicable; he was, Benham understood quite clearly, never to be mentioned again; but somehow from the past his shadow and his legacy cast a peculiar and perplexing shadow of undefined obligation upon Benham's outlook. His resolution to go round the world carried on his preparations rapidly and steadily, but at the same time his mother's thwarted and angry bearing produced a torture of remorse in him. It was constantly in his mind, like the suit of the importunate widow, that he ought to devote his life to the little lady's happiness and pride, and his reason told him that even if he wanted to make this sacrifice he couldn't; the mere act of making it would produce so entirely catastrophic a revulsion. He could as soon have become a croquet champion or the curate of Chexington church, lines of endeavour which for him would have led straightly and simply to sacrilegious scandal or manslaughter with a mallet.

There is so little measure in the wild atonements of the young that it was perhaps as well for the Research Magnificent that the remorses of this period of Benham's life were too complicated and scattered for a cumulative effect. In the background of his mind and less subdued than its importance could seem to warrant was his promise to bring the Wilder-Morris people into relations with Lady Marayne. They had been so delightful to him that he felt quite acutely the slight he was putting upon them by this delay. Lady Marayne's moods, however, had been so uncertain that he had found no occasion to broach this trifling matter, and when at last the occasion came he perceived in the same instant the fullest reasons for regretting it.

“Ah!” she said, hanging only for a moment, and then: “you told me you were alone!”...

Her mind leapt at once to the personification of these people as all that had puzzled and baffled her in her son since his flight from London. They were the enemy, they had got hold of him.

“When I asked you if you were alone you pretended to be angry,” she remembered with a flash. “You said, 'Do I tell lies?'”

“I WAS alone. Until-- It was an accident. On my walk I was alone.”

But he flinched before her accusing, her almost triumphant, forefinger.

From the instant she heard of them she hated these South Harting people unrestrainedly. She made no attempt to conceal it. Her valiant bantam spirit caught at this quarrel as a refuge from the rare and uncongenial ache of his secession. “And who are they? What are they? What sort of people can they be to drag in a passing young man? I suppose this girl of theirs goes out every evening--Was she painted, Poff?”

She whipped him with her questions as though she was slashing his face. He became dead-white and grimly civil, answering every question as though it was the sanest, most justifiable inquiry.

“Of course I don't know who they are. How should I know? What need is there to know?”

“There are ways of finding out,” she insisted. “If I am to go down and make myself pleasant to these people because of you.”

“But I implore you not to.”

“And five minutes ago you were imploring me to! Of course I shall.”

“Oh well!--well!”

“One has to know SOMETHING of the people to whom one commits oneself, surely.”

“They are decent people; they are well-behaved people.”

“Oh!--I'll behave well. Don't think I'll disgrace your casual acquaintances. But who they are, what they are, I WILL know....”

On that point Lady Marayne was to score beyond her utmost expectations.

“Come round,” she said over the telephone, two mornings later. “I've something to tell you.”

She was so triumphant that she was sorry for him. When it came to telling him, she failed from her fierceness.

“Poff, my little son,” she said, “I'm so sorry I hardly know how to tell you. Poff, I'm sorry. I have to tell you--and it's utterly beastly.”

“But what?” he asked.

“These people are dreadful people.”

“But how?”

“You've heard of the great Kent and Eastern Bank smash and the Marlborough Building Society frauds eight or nine years ago?”

“Vaguely. But what has that to do with them?”

“That man Morris.”

She stopped short, and Benham nodded for her to go on.

“Her father,” said Lady Marayne.

“But who was Morris? Really, mother, I don't remember.”

“He was sentenced to seven years--ten years--I forget. He had done all sorts of dreadful things. He was a swindler. And when he went out of the dock into the waiting-room-- He had a signet ring with prussic acid in it--...”

“I remember now,” he said.

A silence fell between them.

Benham stood quite motionless on the hearthrug and stared very hard at the little volume of Henley's poetry that lay upon the table.

He cleared his throat presently.

“You can't go and see them then,” he said. “After all--since I am going abroad so soon--... It doesn't so very much matter.”

10