Chapter 18

“Cheetah!” she cried in a voice of soft distress, “I love you. What do you mean?”

And she staggered forward, tear-blinded, and felt for his neck and shoulders, so that she might weep in his arms....

5

“Don't say we are separated,” she whispered, putting her still wet face close to his.

“No. We're mates,” he answered softly, with his arm about her.

“How could we ever keep away from each uvver?” she whispered.

He was silent.

“How COULD we?”

He answered aloud. “Amanda,” he said, “I mean to go round the world.”

She disentangled herself from his arm and sat up beside him.

“What is to become of me,” she asked suddenly in a voice of despair, “while you go round the world? If you desert me in London,” she said, “if you shame me by deserting me in London-- If you leave me, I will never forgive you, Cheetah! Never.” Then in an almost breathless voice, and as if she spoke to herself, “Never in all my days.”

6

It was after that that Amanda began to talk about children. There was nothing involuntary about Amanda. “Soon,” she said, “we must begin to think of children. Not just now, but a little later. It's good to travel and have our fun, but life is unreal until there are children in the background. No woman is really content until she is a mother....” And for nearly a fortnight nothing more was said about that solitary journey round the world.

But children were not the only new topic in Amanda's talk. She set herself with an ingenious subtlety to remind her husband that there were other men in the world. The convenient fags, sometimes a little embarrassed, found their inobtrusive services being brought into the light before Benham's eyes. Most of them were much older men than himself, elderly philanderers of whom it seemed to him no sane man need be jealous, men often of forty or more, but one was a contemporary, Sir Philip Easton, a man with a touch of Spanish blood and a suggestion of Spanish fire, who quite manifestly was very much in love with Amanda and of whom she spoke with a slight perceptible difference of manner that made Benham faintly uneasy. He was ashamed of the feeling. Easton it seemed was a man of a peculiarly fine honour, so that Amanda could trust herself with him to an extent that would have been inadvisable with men of a commoner substance, and he had a gift of understanding and sympathy that was almost feminine; he could cheer one up when one was lonely and despondent. For Amanda was so methodical in the arrangement of her time that even in the full rush of a London season she could find an hour now and then for being lonely and despondent. And he was a liberal and understanding purchaser of the ascendant painters; he understood that side of Amanda's interests, a side upon which Benham was notably deficient....

“Amanda seems to like that dark boy, Poff; what is his name?--Sir Philip Easton?” said Lady Marayne.

Benham looked at her with a slightly hostile intelligence, and said nothing.

“When a man takes a wife, he has to keep her,” said Lady Marayne.

“No,” said Benham after consideration. “I don't intend to be a wife-herd.”

“What?”

“Wife-herd--same as goat-herd.”

“Coarse, you are sometimes, Poff--nowadays.”

“It's exactly what I mean. I can understand the kind of curator's interest an Oriental finds in shepherding a large establishment, but to spend my days looking after one person who ought to be able to look after herself--”

“She's very young.”

“She's quite grown up. Anyhow I'm not a moral nursemaid.”

“If you leave her about and go abroad--”

“Has she been talking to you, mother?”

“The thing shows.”

“But about my going abroad?”

“She said something, my little Poff.”

Lady Marayne suddenly perceived that beneath Benham's indifference was something strung very tight, as though he had been thinking inordinately. He weighed his words before he spoke again. “If Amanda chooses to threaten me with a sort of conditional infidelity, I don't see that it ought to change the plans I have made for my life....”

7

“No aristocrat has any right to be jealous,” Benham wrote. “If he chances to be mated with a woman who does not see his vision or naturally go his way, he has no right to expect her, much less to compel her to go his way. What is the use of dragging an unwilling companion through morasses of uncongenial thought to unsought ends? What is the use of dragging even a willing pretender, who has no inherent will to seek and live the aristocratic life?

“But that does not excuse him from obedience to his own call....”

He wrote that very early in his examination of the Third Limitation. Already he had thought out and judged Amanda. The very charm of her, the sweetness, the nearness and magic of her, was making him more grimly resolute to break away. All the elaborate process of thinking her over had gone on behind the mask of his silences while she had been preoccupied with her housing and establishment in London; it was with a sense of extraordinary injustice, of having had a march stolen upon her, of being unfairly trapped, that Amanda found herself faced by foregone conclusions. He was ready now even with the details of his project. She should go on with her life in London exactly as she had planned it. He would take fifteen hundred a year for himself and all the rest she might spend without check or stint as it pleased her. He was going round the world for one or two years. It was even possible he would not go alone. There was a man at Cambridge he might persuade to come with him, a don called Prothero who was peculiarly useful in helping him to hammer out his ideas....

To her it became commandingly necessary that none of these things should happen.

She tried to play upon his jealousy, but her quick instinct speedily told her that this only hardened his heart. She perceived that she must make a softer appeal. Now of a set intention she began to revive and imitate the spontaneous passion of the honeymoon; she perceived for the first time clearly how wise and righteous a thing it is for a woman to bear a child. “He cannot go if I am going to have a child,” she told herself. But that would mean illness, and for illness in herself or others Amanda had the intense disgust natural to her youth. Yet even illness would be better than this intolerable publication of her husband's ability to leave her side....

She had a wonderful facility of enthusiasm and she set herself forthwith to cultivate a philoprogenitive ambition, to communicate it to him. Her dread of illness disappeared; her desire for offspring grew.

“Yes,” he said, “I want to have children, but I must go round the world none the less.”

She argued with all the concentrated subtlety of her fine keen mind. She argued with persistence and repetition. And then suddenly so that she was astonished at herself, there came a moment when she ceased to argue.

She stood in the dusk in a window that looked out upon the park, and she was now so intent upon her purpose as to be still and self-forgetful; she was dressed in a dinner-dress of white and pale green, that set off her slim erect body and the strong clear lines of her neck and shoulders very beautifully, some greenish stones caught a light from without and flashed soft whispering gleams from amidst the misty darkness of her hair. She was going to Lady Marayne and the opera, and he was bound for a dinner at the House with some young Liberals at which he was to meet two representative Indians with a grievance from Bengal. Husband and wife had but a few moments together. She asked about his company and he told her.

“They will tell you about India.”

“Yes.”

She stood for a moment looking out across the lights and the dark green trees, and then she turned to him.

“Why cannot I come with you?” she asked with sudden passion. “Why cannot I see the things you want to see?”

“I tell you you are not interested. You would only be interested through me. That would not help me. I should just be dealing out my premature ideas to you. If you cared as I care, if you wanted to know as I want to know, it would be different. But you don't. It isn't your fault that you don't. It happens so. And there is no good in forced interest, in prescribed discovery.”

“Cheetah,” she asked, “what is it that you want to know--that I don't care for?”

“I want to know about the world. I want to rule the world.”

“So do I.”

“No, you want to have the world.”

“Isn't it the same?”

“No. You're a greedier thing than I am, you Black Leopard you--standing there in the dusk. You're a stronger thing. Don't you know you're stronger? When I am with you, you carry your point, because you are more concentrated, more definite, less scrupulous. When you run beside me you push me out of my path.... You've made me afraid of you.... And so I won't go with you, Leopard. I go alone. It isn't because I don't love you. I love you too well. It isn't because you aren't beautiful and wonderful....”

“But, Cheetah! nevertheless you care more for this that you want than you care for me.”

Benham thought of it. “I suppose I do,” he said.

“What is it that you want? Still I don't understand.”

Her voice had the break of one who would keep reasonable in spite of pain.

“I ought to tell you.”

“Yes, you ought to tell me.”

“I wonder if I can tell you,” he said very thoughtfully, and rested his hands on his hips. “I shall seem ridiculous to you.”

“You ought to tell me.”

“I think what I want is to be king of the world.”

She stood quite still staring at him.

“I do not know how I can tell you of it. Amanda, do you remember those bodies--you saw those bodies--those mutilated men?”

“I saw them,” said Amanda.

“Well. Is it nothing to you that those things happen?”

“They must happen.”

“No. They happen because there are no kings but pitiful kings. They happen because the kings love their Amandas and do not care.”

“But what can YOU do, Cheetah?”

“Very little. But I can give my life and all my strength. I can give all I can give.”

“But how? How can you help it--help things like that massacre?”

“I can do my utmost to find out what is wrong with my world and rule it and set it right.”

“YOU! Alone.”

“Other men do as much. Every one who does so helps others to do so. You see--... In this world one may wake in the night and one may resolve to be a king, and directly one has resolved one is a king. Does that sound foolishness to you? Anyhow, it's fair that I should tell you, though you count me a fool. This--this kingship--this dream of the night--is my life. It is the very core of me. Much more than you are. More than anything else can be. I mean to be a king in this earth. KING. I'm not mad.... I see the world staggering from misery to misery and there is little wisdom, less rule, folly, prejudice, limitation, the good things come by chance and the evil things recover and slay them, and it is my world and I am responsible. Every man to whom this light has come is responsible. As soon as this light comes to you, as soon as your kingship is plain to you, there is no more rest, no peace, no delight, except in work, in service, in utmost effort. As far as I can do it I will rule my world. I cannot abide in this smug city, I cannot endure its self-complacency, its routine, its gloss of success, its rottenness.... I shall do little, perhaps I shall do nothing, but what I can understand and what I can do I will do. Think of that wild beautiful country we saw, and the mean misery, the filth and the warring cruelty of the life that lives there, tragedy, tragedy without dignity; and think, too, of the limitless ugliness here, and of Russia slipping from disorder to massacre, and China, that sea of human beings, sliding steadily to disaster. Do you think these are only things in the newspapers? To me at any rate they are not things in newspapers; they are pain and failure, they are torment, they are blood and dust and misery. They haunt me day and night. Even if it is utterly absurd I will still do my utmost. It IS absurd. I'm a madman and you and my mother are sensible people.... And I will go my way.... I don't care for the absurdity. I don't care a rap.”

He stopped abruptly.

“There you have it, Amanda. It's rant, perhaps. Sometimes I feel it's rant. And yet it's the breath of life to me.... There you are.... At last I've been able to break silence and tell you....”

He stopped with something like a sob and stood regarding the dusky mystery of her face. She stood quite still, she was just a beautiful outline in the twilight, her face was an indistinctness under the black shadow of her hair, with eyes that were two patches of darkness.

He looked at his watch, lifting it close to his face to see the time. His voice changed. “Well--if you provoke a man enough, you see he makes speeches. Let it be a lesson to you, Amanda. Here we are talking instead of going to our dinners. The car has been waiting ten minutes.”

Amanda, so still, was the most disconcerting of all Amandas....

A strange exaltation seized upon her very suddenly. In an instant she had ceased to plot against him. A vast wave of emotion swept her forward to a resolution that astonished her.

“Cheetah!” she said, and the very quality of her voice had changed, “give me one thing. Stay until June with me.”

“Why?” he asked.

Her answer came in a voice so low that it was almost a whisper.

“Because--now--no, I don't want to keep you any more--I am not trying to hold you any more.... I want....”

She came forward to him and looked up closely at his face.

“Cheetah,” she whispered almost inaudibly, “Cheetah--I didn't understand. But now--. I want to bear your child.”

He was astonished. “Old Leopard!” he said.

“No,” she answered, putting her hands upon his shoulders and drawing very close to him, “Queen---if I can be--to your King.”

“You want to bear me a child!” he whispered, profoundly moved.

8

The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of Commons came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer. And over against Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of those men who know that their judgments are quoted.

“Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?” he asked of his neighbour in confidential undertones....

He tittered. “I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY aware that the man to her left is talking to her....”

9

A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was now a fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer....

All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in some way Prothero was necessary to his mind. It was as if he looked to Prothero to keep him real. He suspected even while he obeyed that upward flourish which was his own essential characteristic. He had a peculiar feeling that somehow that upward bias would betray him; that from exaltation he might presently float off, into the higher, the better, and so to complete unreality. He fled from priggishness and the terror of such sublimity alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation to so many things Prothero in a peculiar distinctive manner SAW. He had less self-control than Benham, less integrity of purpose, less concentration, and things that were before his eyes were by the very virtue of these defects invariably visible to him. Things were able to insist upon themselves with him. Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted his purpose too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them. He repudiated inconvenient facts. He mastered and made his world; Prothero accepted and recorded his. Benham was a will towards the universe where Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive activity. And it was because of his realization of this profound difference between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking Prothero with him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision--rather like that eye the Graiae used to hand one another....

After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms in Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue sky, seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholarship pervaded them--a little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not completely forgotten. Prothero's door had been locked against the world, and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better part of a second. He might have been asleep, he might have been doing anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before Benham' s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host to the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red, incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE, its cover proclaimed....

His host followed that glance and blushed. “They send me all sorts of inappropriate stuff to review,” he remarked.

And then he was denouncing celibacy.

The transition wasn't very clear to Benham. His mind had been preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project. Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between his teeth and bolted. He began to say the most shocking things right away, so that Benham's attention was caught in spite of himself.

“Inflammatory classics.”

“What's that?”

“Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me,” said Prothero. “I can't stand it any longer.”

It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world, such a statement might have been credible. Even in his own life,--it was now indeed a remote, forgotten stage--there had been something distantly akin....

“You're going to marry?”

“I must.”

“Who's the lady, Billy?”

“I don't know. Venus.”

His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly. “So far as I know, it is Venus Anadyomene.” A flash of laughter passed across his face and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. “I like her best, anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! I feel that almost any of them--”

“Tut, tut!” said Benham.

Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.

“Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face? I am not pronouncing an immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. I am telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I feel. I want--Venus. I don't want her to talk to or anything of that sort.... I have been studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning, instead of doing any work. Would you like to see it?... NO!...

“This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad. It is a peculiarly erotic spring. I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend to ordinary conversation. These feelings, I understand, are by no means peculiar to myself.... No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now that the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in you said, 'How are you?' I am telling you how I am. You brought it on yourself. Well--I am--inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious convictions to assist me either to endure or deny this--this urgency. And so why should I deny it? It's one of our chief problems here. The majority of my fellow dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and combination-room are in just the same case as myself. The fever in oneself detects the fever in others. I know their hidden thoughts. Their fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts. Each covers his miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference. A tattered cloak.... Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible vice of continence--”

“Billy, what's the matter with you?”

Prothero grimaced impatience. “Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a humbug, Benham?” he screamed, and in screaming became calmer. “Nature taunts me, maddens me. My life is becoming a hell of shame. 'Get out from all these books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.' The Flesh, Benham. Yes--I insist--the Flesh. Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any man a pure spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage, with too much port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked Aspasia.”

“Mutual, perhaps, Billy.”

“Oh! you can sneer!”

“Well, clearly--Saint Paul is my authority--it's marriage, Billy.”

Prothero had walked to the window. He turned round.

“I CAN'T marry,” he said. “The trouble has gone too far. I've lost my nerve in the presence of women. I don't like them any more. They come at one--done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about all sorts of things that don't matter....” He surveyed his friend's thoughtful attitude. “I'm getting to hate women, Benham. I'm beginning now to understand the bitterness of spinsters against men. I'm beginning to grasp the unkindliness of priests. The perpetual denial. To you, happily married, a woman is just a human being. You can talk to her, like her, you can even admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge against her....”

He sat down abruptly.

Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered him.

“Billy! this is delusion,” he said. “What's come over you?”

“I'm telling you,” said Prothero.

“No,” said Benham.

Prothero awaited some further utterance.

“I'm looking for the cause of it. It's feeding, Billy. It's port and stimulants where there is no scope for action. It's idleness. I begin to see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser.”

“Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers. Look at that filing system like an arsenal of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow not idleness.”

“There's still bodily idleness. No. That's your trouble. You're stuffy. You've enlarged your liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning after an extravagant breakfast--. And peep and covet.”

“Just eggs and bacon!”

“Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. Come out of it, Billy, and get aired.”

“How can one?”

“Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!”

“It's an infernally warm morning.

“Walk with me to Grantchester.”

“We might go by boat. You could row.”

“WALK.”

“I ought to do these papers.”

“You weren't doing them.”

“No....”

“Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours is--horrid--and just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come with me to Russia and about the world. I'm going to leave my wife--”

“Leave your wife!”

“Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead you are in this disgusting state. I've never met anything in my life so hot and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one talk to you?”

10

“You pull things down to your own level,” said Benham as they went through the heat to Grantchester.

“I pull them down to truth,” panted Prothero.

“Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and discipline and training some sort of falsity!”

“Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride.”

For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....

The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.

“I'm not talking of Love,” he said, remaining persistently outrageous. “I'm talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is physically possible....

“But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?”

“Then why don't we up and find out?” said Billy.