Chapter 19

He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that surrounded these questions. We didn't worship our ancestors when it came to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? “What is the wisdom of the ages?” said Prothero. “Think of the corners where that wisdom was born.... Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic....”

“Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?” protested Benham.

The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter experience. Most of it was better forgotten. It didn't convince. It had never worked things out. In this matter just as in every other matter that really signified things had still to be worked out. Nothing had been worked out hitherto. The wisdom of the ages was a Cant. People had been too busy quarrelling, fighting and running away. There wasn't any digested experience of the ages at all. Only the mis-remembered hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man.

“Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or isn't it?” Prothero demanded. “There's a simple question enough, and is there anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages to tell me yes or no? Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and vigorous as a mated man? Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being? Can she be? I don't believe so. Then why in thunder do we let her be? Here am I at a centre of learning and wisdom and I don't believe so; and there is nothing in all our colleges, libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here, to settle that plain question for me, plainly and finally. My life is a grubby torment of cravings because it isn't settled. If sexual activity IS a part of the balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let's set about making it accessible and harmless and have done with it. Swedish exercises. That sort of thing. If it isn't, if it can be reduced and done without, then let us set about teaching people HOW to control themselves and reduce and get rid of this vehement passion. But all this muffled mystery, this pompous sneak's way we take with it!”

“But, Billy! How can one settle these things? It's a matter of idiosyncrasy. What is true for one man isn't true for another. There's infinite difference of temperaments!”

“Then why haven't we a classification of temperaments and a moral code for each sort? Why am I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like a glove? It isn't convenient for me. It fits me like a hair-shirt. Of course there are temperaments, but why can't we formulate them and exercise the elementary charity of recognizing that one man's health in these matters is another man's death? Some want love and gratification and some don't. There are people who want children and people who don't want to be bothered by children but who are full of vivid desires. There are people whose only happiness is chastity, and women who would rather be courtesans than mothers. Some of us would concentrate upon a single passion or a single idea; others overflow with a miscellaneous--tenderness. Yes,--and you smile! Why spit upon and insult a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin at it? Why try every one by the standards that suit oneself? We're savages, Benham, shamefaced savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting.

“I was angry about sex by seventeen,” he went on. “Every year I live I grow angrier.”

His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.

“Think,” he said, “of the amount of thinking and feeling about sex that is going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these thousands full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it together; we work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and casual stories, patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders, disease, trouble, escapes; and the next generation will start, and the next generation after that will start with nothing but your wisdom of the ages, which isn't wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos and mystery and the secretive cunning of the savage....

“What I really want to do is my work,” said Prothero, going off quite unexpectedly again. “That is why all this business, this incessant craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry....”

11

“There I'm with you,” cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent of Prothero's prepossessions. “What we want to do is our work.”

He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting the word again.

“It's this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--living the aristocratic life, which takes all the coarse simplicity out of this business. If it was only submission.... YOU think it is only submission--giving way.... It isn't only submission. We'd manage sex all right, we'd be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn't know all the time that there was something else to live for, something far more important. And different. Absolutely different and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these considerations. It won't fit in.... I don't know what this other thing is; it's what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS, in all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands control, it demands continence, it insists upon disregard.”

But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to Prothero that day.

“Mankind,” said Benham, “is overcharged with this sex. It suffocates us. It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as being married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love story....”

“Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied,” said Prothero, sticking stoutly to his own view.

12

It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the imagination of Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero's troubles as soar over them. It is the last triumph of the human understanding to sympathize with desires we do not share, and to Benham who now believed himself to be loved beyond the chances of life, who was satisfied and tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible that Prothero's demands should seem anything more than the grotesque and squalid squealings of the beast that has to be overridden and rejected altogether. It is a freakish fact of our composition that these most intense feelings in life are just those that are most rapidly and completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years, but the magic of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives and vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was still not a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale, and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its sty....

What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at last he could sufficiently release Prothero's attention, he unfolded the project that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.

He had discovered a new reason for travelling. The last country we can see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country. It is as hard to see one's own country as it is to see the back of one's head. It is too much behind us, too much ourselves. But Russia is like England with everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked about St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage untamed London on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal cities, like no other capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings mingled in their effects. Like London it looked over the heads of its own people to a limitless polyglot empire. And Russia was an aristocratic land, with a middle-class that had no pride in itself as a class; it had a British toughness and incompetence, a British disregard of logic and meticulous care. Russia, like England, was outside Catholic Christendom, it had a state church and the opposition to that church was not secularism but dissent. One could draw a score of such contrasted parallels. And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid bare the elemental facts of a great social organization. It was having its South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a certain defeat instead of a dubious victory....

“There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in England,” said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.

Benham went on with his discourse about Russia....

“At the college of Troitzka,” said Prothero, “which I understand is a kind of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality.”

Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.

He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation. He led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty of every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much. And so he was going, and if Prothero cared to come too--

“Yes,” said Prothero, “I should like to go to Russia.”

13

But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was never able to lift Prothero away from his obsession. It was the substance of their talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting destroyers and winking beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the smoothly undulating darkness of the North Sea; it rose upon them again as they sat over the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in the express for Berlin. Prothero filled the Sieges Allee with his complaints against nature and society, and distracted Benham in his contemplation of Polish agriculture from the windows of the train with turgid sexual liberalism. So that Benham, during this period until Prothero left him and until the tragic enormous spectacle of Russia in revolution took complete possession of him, was as it were thinking upon two floors. Upon the one he was thinking of the vast problems of a society of a hundred million people staggering on the verge of anarchy, and upon the other he was perplexed by the feverish inattention of Prothero to the tremendous things that were going on all about them. It was only presently when the serenity of his own private life began to be ruffled by disillusionment, that he began to realize the intimate connexion of these two systems of thought. Yet Prothero put it to him plainly enough.

“Inattentive,” said Prothero, “of course I am inattentive. What is really the matter with all this--this social mess people are in here, is that nearly everybody is inattentive. These Big Things of yours, nobody is thinking of them really. Everybody is thinking about the Near Things that concern himself.”

“The bombs they threw yesterday? The Cossacks and the whips?”

“Nudges. Gestures of inattention. If everybody was thinking of the Res Publica would there be any need for bombs?”

He pursued his advantage. “It's all nonsense to suppose people think of politics because they are in 'em. As well suppose that the passengers on a liner understand the engines, or soldiers a war. Before men can think of to-morrow, they must think of to-day. Before they can think of others, they must be sure about themselves. First of all, food; the private, the personal economic worry. Am I safe for food? Then sex, and until one is tranquil and not ashamed, not irritated and dissatisfied, how can one care for other people, or for next year or the Order of the World? How can one, Benham?”

He seized the illustration at hand. “Here we are in Warsaw--not a month after bomb-throwing and Cossack charging. Windows have still to be mended, smashed doors restored. There's blood-stains still on some of the houses. There are hundreds of people in the Citadel and in the Ochrana prison. This morning there were executions. Is it anything more than an eddy in the real life of the place? Watch the customers in the shops, the crowd in the streets, the men in the cafes who stare at the passing women. They are all swallowed up again in their own business. They just looked up as the Cossacks galloped past; they just shifted a bit when the bullets spat....”

And when the streets of Moscow were agog with the grotesque amazing adventure of the Potemkin mutineers, Prothero was in the full tide of the private romance that severed him from Benham and sent him back to Cambridge--changed.

Before they reached Moscow Benham was already becoming accustomed to disregard Prothero. He was looking over him at the vast heaving trouble of Russia, which now was like a sea that tumbles under the hurrying darknesses of an approaching storm. In those days it looked as though it must be an overwhelming storm. He was drinking in the wide and massive Russian effects, the drifting crowds in the entangling streets, the houses with their strange lettering in black and gold, the innumerable barbaric churches, the wildly driven droshkys, the sombre red fortress of the Kremlin, with its bulbous churches clustering up into the sky, the crosses, the innumerable gold crosses, the mad church of St. Basil, carrying the Russian note beyond the pitch of permissible caricature, and in this setting the obscure drama of clustering, staring, sash-wearing peasants, long-haired students, sane-eyed women, a thousand varieties of uniform, a running and galloping to and fro of messengers, a flutter of little papers, whispers, shouts, shots, a drama elusive and portentous, a gathering of forces, an accumulation of tension going on to a perpetual clash and clamour of bells. Benham had brought letters of introduction to a variety of people, some had vanished, it seemed. They were “away,” the porters said, and they continued to be “away,”--it was the formula, he learnt, for arrest; others were evasive, a few showed themselves extraordinarily anxious to inform him about things, to explain themselves and things about them exhaustively. One young student took him to various meetings and showed him in great detail the scene of the recent murder of the Grand Duke Sergius. The buildings opposite the old French cannons were still under repair. “The assassin stood just here. The bomb fell there, look! right down there towards the gate; that was where they found his arm. He was torn to fragments. He was scraped up. He was mixed with the horses....”

Every one who talked spoke of the outbreak of revolution as a matter of days or at the utmost weeks. And whatever question Benham chose to ask these talkers were prepared to answer. Except one. “And after the revolution,” he asked, “what then?...” Then they waved their hands, and failed to convey meanings by reassuring gestures.

He was absorbed in his effort to understand this universal ominous drift towards a conflict. He was trying to piece together a process, if it was one and the same process, which involved riots in Lodz, fighting at Libau, wild disorder at Odessa, remote colossal battlings in Manchuria, the obscure movements of a disastrous fleet lost somewhere now in the Indian seas, steaming clumsily to its fate, he was trying to rationalize it all in his mind, to comprehend its direction. He was struggling strenuously with the obscurities of the language in which these things were being discussed about him, a most difficult language demanding new sets of visual images because of its strange alphabet. Is it any wonder that for a time he failed to observe that Prothero was involved in some entirely disconnected affair.

They were staying at the big Cosmopolis bazaar in the Theatre Square. Thither, through the doors that are opened by distraught-looking men with peacocks' feathers round their caps, came Benham's friends and guides to take him out and show him this and that. At first Prothero always accompanied Benham on these expeditions; then he began to make excuses. He would stay behind in the hotel. Then when Benham returned Prothero would have disappeared. When the porter was questioned about Prothero his nescience was profound.

One night no Prothero was discoverable at any hour, and Benham, who wanted to discuss a project for going on to Kieff and Odessa, was alarmed.

“Moscow is a late place,” said Benham's student friend. “You need not be anxious until after four or five in the morning. It will be quite time--QUITE time to be anxious to-morrow. He may be--close at hand.”

When Benham hunted up Prothero in his room next morning he found him sleepy and irritable.

“I don't trouble if YOU are late,” said Prothero, sitting up in his bed with a red resentful face and crumpled hair. “I wasn't born yesterday.”

“I wanted to talk about leaving Moscow.”

“I don't want to leave Moscow.”

“But Odessa--Odessa is the centre of interest just now.”

“I want to stay in Moscow.”

Benham looked baffled.

Prothero stuck up his knees and rested his night-shirted arms upon them. “I don't want to leave Moscow,” he said, “and I'm not going to do so.”

“But haven't we done--”

Prothero interrupted. “You may. But I haven't. We're not after the same things. Things that interest you, Benham, don't interest me. I've found--different things.”

His expression was extraordinarily defiant.

“I want,” he went on, “to put our affairs on a different footing. Now you've opened the matter we may as well go into it. You were good enough to bring me here.... There was a sort of understanding we were working together.... We aren't.... The long and short of it is, Benham, I want to pay you for my journey here and go on my own--independently.”

His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly incredible in him.

Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters jerked back into Benham's memory. It popped back so suddenly that for an instant he wanted to laugh. He turned towards the window, picked his way among Prothero's carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS. Then he turned.

“Billy,” he said, “didn't I see you the other evening driving towards the Hermitage?”

“Yes,” said Prothero, and added, “that's it.”

“You were with a lady.”

“And she IS a lady,” said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face twitched as though he was going to weep.

“She's a Russian?”

“She had an English mother. Oh, you needn't stand there and look so damned ironical! She's--she's a woman. She's a thing of kindness....”

He was too full to go on.

“Billy, old boy,” said Benham, distressed, “I don't want to be ironical--”

Prothero had got his voice again.

“You'd better know,” he said, “you'd better know. She's one of those women who live in this hotel.”

“Live in this hotel!”

“On the fourth floor. Didn't you know? It's the way in most of these big Russian hotels. They come down and sit about after lunch and dinner. A woman with a yellow ticket. Oh! I don't care. I don't care a rap. She's been kind to me; she's--she's dear to me. How are you to understand? I shall stop in Moscow. I shall take her to England. I can't live without her, Benham. And then-- And then you come worrying me to come to your damned Odessa!”

And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face as though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an apoplectic moment burst noisily into tears. They ran between his fingers. “Get out of my room,” he shouted, suffocatingly. “What business have you to come prying on me?”

Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared round-eyed at his friend. His hands were in his pockets. For a time he said nothing.

“Billy,” he began at last, and stopped again. “Billy, in this country somehow one wants to talk like a Russian. Billy, my dear--I'm not your father, I'm not your judge. I'm--unreasonably fond of you. It's not my business to settle what is right or wrong for you. If you want to stay in Moscow, stay in Moscow. Stay here, and stay as my guest....”

He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.

“I didn't know,” said Prothero brokenly; “I didn't know it was possible to get so fond of a person....”

Benham stood up. He had never found Prothero so attractive and so abominable in his life before.

“I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I'll make things all right here before I go....”

He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound thought to his own room....

Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to explain what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about the room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.

In an unaccountable way Prothero's bristling little mind seemed to have shrunken to something sleek and small.

“I wish,” he said, “you could stay for a later train and have lunch and meet her. She's not the ordinary thing. She's--different.”

Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. “Billy,” he said, “no woman IS the ordinary thing. They are all--different....”

14

For a time this affair of Prothero's seemed to be a matter as disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any matter to be. While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and travelled hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in the endless tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero was lost to all those large issues in the development of his personal situation. He contributed nothing to Benham's thought except attempts at discouragement. He reiterated his declaration that all the vast stress and change of Russian national life was going on because it was universally disregarded. “I tell you, as I told you before, that nobody is attending. You think because all Moscow, all Russia, is in the picture, that everybody is concerned. Nobody is concerned. Nobody cares what is happening. Even the men who write in newspapers and talk at meetings about it don't care. They are thinking of their dinners, of their clothes, of their money, of their wives. They hurry home....”

That was his excuse.

Manifestly it was an excuse.