Chapter 20

His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy and divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible. To Benham in those days everything was very simple in this business of love. The aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all. He had to love Amanda. He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in love, he felt, than they had ever been before. They were now writing love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation that was almost voluptuous. She found in the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to him and to the natural fate of women, a delightful exercise for her very considerable powers of expression. Life pointed now wonderfully to the great time ahead when there would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and meanwhile the Cheetah loped about the wild world upon a mighty quest. In such terms she put it. Such foolishness written in her invincibly square and youthful hand went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up against his return in the porter's office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or pursued him down through the jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or waited for him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his journeyings wastefully or in several instances went altogether astray. Perhaps they supplied self-educating young strikers in the postal service with useful exercises in the deciphering of manuscript English. He wrote back five hundred different ways of saying that he loved her extravagantly....

It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and solution of all those sexual perplexities that distressed the world; Heroic Love to its highest note--and then you go about your business. It seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one's chin high and diffuse a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate multitudes who stewed in affliction and hate because they had failed as yet to find this simple, culminating elucidation. And Prothero--Prothero, too, was now achieving the same grand elementariness, out of his lusts and protests and general physical squalor he had flowered into love. For a time it is true it made rather an ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere goose-stepping for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay exaltation. Benham had had as yet but a passing glimpse of this Anglo-Russian, who was a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him, and his impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with dusky hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her, a quiet alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda. And if she liked old Prothero-- And, indeed, she must like old Prothero or could she possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?

They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero's soul would wake up and face the world again. What did it matter what she had been?

Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained anxiety and the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering towards revolution, Benham went with his own love like a lamp within him and this affair of Prothero's reflecting its light, and he was quite prepared for the most sympathetic and liberal behaviour when he came back to Moscow to make the lady's acquaintance. He intended to help Prothero to marry and take her back to Cambridge, and to assist by every possible means in destroying and forgetting the official yellow ticket that defined her status in Moscow. But he reckoned without either Prothero or the young lady in this expectation.

It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations that there were obscure obstacles to this manifest course. Prothero hesitated; the lady expressed doubts.

On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished. It was chiefly a similarity of complexion. She had a more delicate face than Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none of Amanda's glow, and she spoke her mother's language with a pretty halting limp that was very different from Amanda's clear decisions.

She put her case compactly.

“I would not DO in Cambridge,” she said with an infinitesimal glance at Prothero.

“Mr. Benham,” she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman of affairs, “now do you see me in Cambridge? Now do you see me? Kept outside the walls? In a little DATCHA? With no occupation? Just to amuse him.”

And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved still completer lucidity.

“I would come if I thought he wanted me to come,” she said. “But you see if I came he would not want me to come. Because then he would have me and so he wouldn't want me. He would just have the trouble. And I am not sure if I should be happy in Cambridge. I am not sure I should be happy enough to make him happy. It is a very learned and intelligent and charming society, of course; but here, THINGS HAPPEN. At Cambridge nothing happens--there is only education. There is no revolution in Cambridge; there are not even sinful people to be sorry for.... And he says himself that Cambridge people are particular. He says they are liberal but very, very particular, and perhaps I could not always act my part well. Sometimes I am not always well behaved. When there is music I behave badly sometimes, or when I am bored. He says the Cambridge people are so liberal that they do not mind what you are, but he says they are so particular that they mind dreadfully how you are what you are.... So that it comes to exactly the same thing....”

“Anna Alexievna,” said Benham suddenly, “are you in love with Prothero?”

Her manner became conscientiously scientific.

“He is very kind and very generous--too generous. He keeps sending for more money--hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him.”

“Were you EVER in love?”

“Of course. But it's all gone long ago. It was like being hungry. Only very fine hungry. Exquisite hungry.... And then being disgusted....”

“He is in love with you.”

“What is love?” said Anna. “He is grateful. He is by nature grateful.” She smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who looks down on her bambino.

“And you love nothing?”

“I love Russia--and being alone, being completely alone. When I am dead perhaps I shall be alone. Not even my own body will touch me then.”

Then she added, “But I shall be sorry when he goes.”

Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone. “Your Anna,” he said, “is rather wonderful. At first, I tell you now frankly I did not like her very much, I thought she looked 'used,' she drank vodka at lunch, she was gay, uneasily; she seemed a sham thing. All that was prejudice. She thinks; she's generous, she's fine.”

“She's tragic,” said Prothero as though it was the same thing.

He spoke as though he noted an objection. His next remark confirmed this impression. “That's why I can't take her back to Cambridge,” he said.

“You see, Benham,” he went on, “she's human. She's not really feminine. I mean, she's--unsexed. She isn't fitted to be a wife or a mother any more. We've talked about the possible life in England, very plainly. I've explained what a household in Cambridge would mean.... It doesn't attract her.... In a way she's been let out from womanhood, forced out of womanhood, and I see now that when women are let out from womanhood there's no putting them back. I could give a lecture on Anna. I see now that if women are going to be wives and mothers and homekeepers and ladies, they must be got ready for it from the beginning, sheltered, never really let out into the wild chances of life. She has been. Bitterly. She's REALLY emancipated. And it's let her out into a sort of nothingness. She's no longer a woman, and she isn't a man. She ought to be able to go on her own--like a man. But I can't take her back to Cambridge. Even for her sake.”

His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.

“You won't be happy in Cambridge--alone,” said Benham.

“Oh, damnably not! But what can I do? I had at first some idea of coming to Moscow for good--teaching.”

He paused. “Impossible. I'm worth nothing here. I couldn't have kept her.”

“Then what are you going to do, Billy?”

“I don't KNOW what I'm going to do, I tell you. I live for the moment. To-morrow we are going out into the country.”

“I don't understand,” said Benham with a gesture of resignation. “It seems to me that if a man and woman love each other--well, they insist upon each other. What is to happen to her if you leave her in Moscow?”

“Damnation! Is there any need to ask that?”

“Take her to Cambridge, man. And if Cambridge objects, teach Cambridge better manners.”

Prothero's face was suddenly transfigured with rage.

“I tell you she won't come!” he said.

“Billy!” said Benham, “you should make her!”

“I can't.”

“If a man loves a woman he can make her do anything--”

“But I don't love her like that,” said Prothero, shrill with anger. “I tell you I don't love her like that.”

Then he lunged into further deeps. “It's the other men,” he said, “it's the things that have been. Don't you understand? Can't you understand? The memories--she must have memories--they come between us. It's something deeper than reason. It's in one's spine and under one's nails. One could do anything, I perceive, for one's very own woman....”

“MAKE her your very own woman, said the exponent of heroic love.

“I shirk deeds, Benham, but you shirk facts. How could any man make her his very own woman now? You--you don't seem to understand--ANYTHING. She's nobody's woman--for ever. That--that might-have-been has gone for ever.... It's nerves--a passion of the nerves. There's a cruelty in life and-- She's KIND to me. She's so kind to me....”

And then again Prothero was weeping like a vexed child.

15

The end of Prothero's first love affair came to Benham in broken fragments in letters. When he looked for Anna Alexievna in December--he never learnt her surname--he found she had left the Cosmopolis Bazaar soon after Prothero's departure and he could not find whither she had gone. He never found her again. Moscow and Russia had swallowed her up.

Of course she and Prothero parted; that was a foregone conclusion. But Prothero's manner of parting succeeded in being at every phase a shock to Benham's ideas. It was clear he went off almost callously; it would seem there was very little crying. Towards the end it was evident that the two had quarrelled. The tears only came at the very end of all. It was almost as if he had got through the passion and was glad to go. Then came regret, a regret that increased in geometrical proportion with every mile of distance.

In Warsaw it was that grief really came to Prothero. He had some hours there and he prowled the crowded streets, seeing girls and women happy with their lovers, abroad upon bright expeditions and full of delicious secrets, girls and women who ever and again flashed out some instant resemblance to Anna....

In Berlin he stopped a night and almost decided that he would go back. “But now I had the damned frontier,” he wrote, “between us.”

It was so entirely in the spirit of Prothero, Benham thought, to let the “damned frontier” tip the balance against him.

Then came a scrawl of passionate confession, so passionate that it seemed as if Prothero had been transfigured. “I can't stand this business,” he wrote. “It has things in it, possibilities of emotional disturbance--you can have no idea! In the train--luckily I was alone in the compartment--I sat and thought, and suddenly, I could not help it, I was weeping--noisy weeping, an uproar! A beastly German came and stood in the corridor to stare. I had to get out of the train. It is disgraceful, it is monstrous we should be made like this....

“Here I am stranded in Hanover with nothing to do but to write to you about my dismal feelings....”

After that surely there was nothing before a broken-hearted Prothero but to go on with his trailing wing to Trinity and a life of inappeasable regrets; but again Benham reckoned without the invincible earthliness of his friend. Prothero stayed three nights in Paris.

“There is an extraordinary excitement about Paris,” he wrote. “A levity. I suspect the gypsum in the subsoil--some as yet undescribed radiations. Suddenly the world looks brightly cynical.... None of those tear-compelling German emanations....

“And, Benham, I have found a friend.

“A woman. Of course you will laugh, you will sneer. You do not understand these things.... Yet they are so simple. It was the strangest accident brought us together. There was something that drew us together. A sort of instinct. Near the Boulevard Poissoniere....”

“Good heavens!” said Benham. “A sort of instinct!”

“I told her all about Anna!”

“Good Lord!” cried Benham.

“She understood. Perfectly. None of your so-called 'respectable' women could have understood.... At first I intended merely to talk to her....”

Benham crumpled the letter in his hand.

“Little Anna Alexievna!” he said, “you were too clean for him.”

16

Benham had a vision of Prothero returning from all this foreign travel meekly, pensively, a little sadly, and yet not without a kind of relief, to the grey mildness of Trinity. He saw him, capped and gowned, and restored to academic dignity again, nodding greetings, resuming friendships.

The little man merged again into his rare company of discreet Benedicts and restrained celibates at the high tables. They ate on in their mature wisdom long after the undergraduates had fled. Presently they would withdraw processionally to the combination room....

There would be much to talk about over the wine.

Benham speculated what account Prothero would give of Moscow....

He laughed abruptly.

And with that laugh Prothero dropped out of Benham's world for a space of years. There may have been other letters, but if so they were lost in the heaving troubles of a revolution-strained post-office. Perhaps to this day they linger sere and yellow in some forgotten pigeon-hole in Kishinev or Ekaterinoslav....

17

In November, after an adventure in the trader's quarter of Kieff which had brought him within an inch of death, and because an emotional wave had swept across him and across his correspondence with Amanda, Benham went back suddenly to England and her. He wanted very greatly to see her and also he wanted to make certain arrangements about his property. He returned by way of Hungary, and sent telegrams like shouts of excitement whenever the train stopped for a sufficient time. “Old Leopard, I am coming, I am coming,” he telegraphed, announcing his coming for the fourth time. It was to be the briefest of visits, very passionate, the mutual refreshment of two noble lovers, and then he was returning to Russia again.

Amanda was at Chexington, and there he found her installed in the utmost dignity of expectant maternity. Like many other people he had been a little disposed to regard the bearing of children as a common human experience; at Chexington he came to think of it as a rare and sacramental function. Amanda had become very beautiful in quiet, grey, dove-like tones; her sun-touched, boy's complexion had given way to a soft glow of the utmost loveliness, her brisk little neck that had always reminded him of the stalk of a flower was now softened and rounded; her eyes were tender, and she moved about the place in the manner of one who is vowed to a great sacrifice. She dominated the scene, and Lady Marayne, with a certain astonishment in her eyes and a smouldering disposition to irony, was the half-sympathetic, half-resentful priestess of her daughter-in-law's unparalleled immolation. The MOTIF of motherhood was everywhere, and at his bedside he found--it had been put there for him by Amanda--among much other exaltation of woman's mission, that most wonderful of all philoprogenitive stories, Hudson's CRYSTAL AGE.

Everybody at Chexington had an air of being grouped about the impending fact. An epidemic of internal troubles, it is true, kept Sir Godfrey in the depths of London society, but to make up for his absence Mrs. Morris had taken a little cottage down by the river and the Wilder girls were with her, both afire with fine and subtle feelings and both, it seemed, and more particularly Betty, prepared to be keenly critical of Benham's attitude.

He did a little miss his cue in these exaltations, because he had returned in a rather different vein of exaltation.

In missing it he was assisted by Amanda herself, who had at moments an effect upon him of a priestess confidentially disrobed. It was as if she put aside for him something official, something sincerely maintained, necessary, but at times a little irksome. It was as if she was glad to take him into her confidence and unbend. Within the pre-natal Amanda an impish Amanda still lingered.

There were aspects of Amanda that it was manifest dear Betty must never know....

But the real Amanda of that November visit even in her most unpontifical moods did not quite come up to the imagined Amanda who had drawn him home across Europe. At times she was extraordinarily jolly. They had two or three happy walks about the Chexington woods; that year the golden weather of October had flowed over into November, and except for a carpet of green and gold under the horse-chestnuts most of the leaves were still on the trees. Gleams of her old wanton humour shone on him. And then would come something else, something like a shadow across the world, something he had quite forgotten since his idea of heroic love had flooded him, something that reminded him of those long explanations with Mr. Rathbone-Sanders that had never been explained, and of the curate in the doorway of the cottage and his unaccountable tears.

On the afternoon of his arrival at Chexington he was a little surprised to find Sir Philip Easton coming through the house into the garden, with an accustomed familiarity. Sir Philip perceived him with a start that was instantly controlled, and greeted him with unnatural ease.

Sir Philip, it seemed, was fishing and reading and playing cricket in the neighbourhood, which struck Benham as a poor way of spending the summer, the sort of soft holiday a man learns to take from scholars and literary men. A man like Sir Philip, he thought, ought to have been aviating or travelling.

Moreover, when Sir Philip greeted Amanda it seemed to Benham that there was a flavour of established association in their manner. But then Sir Philip was also very assiduous with Lady Marayne. She called him “Pip,” and afterwards Amanda called across the tennis-court to him, “Pip!” And then he called her “Amanda.” When the Wilder girls came up to join the tennis he was just as brotherly....

The next day he came to lunch.

During that meal Benham became more aware than he had ever been before of the peculiar deep expressiveness of this young man's eyes. They watched him and they watched Amanda with a solicitude that seemed at once pained and tender. And there was something about Amanda, a kind of hard brightness, an impartiality and an air of something undefinably suspended, that gave Benham an intuitive certitude that that afternoon Sir Philip would be spoken to privately, and that then he would pack up and go away in a state of illumination from Chexington. But before he could be spoken to he contrived to speak to Benham.

They were left to smoke after lunch, and then it was he took advantage of a pause to commit his little indiscretion.

“Mrs. Benham,” he said, “looks amazingly well--extraordinarily well, don't you think?”

“Yes,” said Benham, startled. “Yes. She certainly keeps very well.”

“She misses you terribly,” said Sir Philip; “it is a time when a woman misses her husband. But, of course, she does not want to hamper your work....”

Benham felt it was very kind of him to take so intimate an interest in these matters, but on the spur of the moment he could find no better expression for this than a grunt.

“You don't mind,” said the young man with a slight catch in the breath that might have been apprehensive, “that I sometimes bring her books and flowers and things? Do what little I can to keep life interesting down here? It's not very congenial.... She's so wonderful--I think she is the most wonderful woman in the world.”

Benham perceived that so far from being a modern aristocrat he was really a primitive barbarian in these matters.

“I've no doubt,” he said, “that my wife has every reason to be grateful for your attentions.”

In the little pause that followed Benham had a feeling that Sir Philip was engendering something still more personal. If so, he might be constrained to invert very gently but very firmly the bowl of chrysanthemums over Sir Philip's head, or kick him in an improving manner. He had a ridiculous belief that Sir Philip would probably take anything of the sort very touchingly. He scrambled in his mind for some remark that would avert this possibility.

“Have you ever been in Russia?” he asked hastily. “It is the most wonderful country in Europe. I had an odd adventure near Kiev. During a pogrom.”

And he drowned the developing situation in a flood of description....

But it was not so easy to drown the little things that were presently thrown out by Lady Marayne. They were so much more in the air....

18

Sir Philip suddenly got out of the picture even as Benham had foreseen.

“Easton has gone away,” he remarked three days later to Amanda.

“I told him to go. He is a bore with you about. But otherwise he is rather a comfort, Cheetah.” She meditated upon Sir Philip. “And he's an HONOURABLE man,” she said. “He's safe....”

19

After that visit it was that the notes upon love and sex began in earnest. The scattered memoranda upon the perfectness of heroic love for the modern aristocrat ended abruptly. Instead there came the first draft for a study of jealousy. The note was written in pencil on Chexington notepaper and manifestly that had been supported on the ribbed cover of a book. There was a little computation in the corner, converting forty-five degrees Reaumur into degrees Fahrenheit, which made White guess it had been written in the Red Sea. But, indeed, it had been written in a rather amateurishly stoked corridor-train on Benham's journey to the gathering revolt in Moscow....

“I think I have been disposed to underrate the force of sexual jealousy.... I thought it was something essentially contemptible, something that one dismissed and put behind oneself in the mere effort to be aristocratic, but I begin to realize that it is not quite so easily settled with....

“One likes to know.... Possibly one wants to know too much.... In phases of fatigue, and particularly in phases of sleeplessness, when one is leaving all that one cares for behind, it becomes an irrational torment....

“And it is not only in oneself that I am astonished by the power of this base motive. I see, too, in the queer business of Prothero how strongly jealousy, how strongly the sense of proprietorship, weighs with a man....

“There is no clear reason why one should insist upon another human being being one's ownest own--utterly one's own....

“There is, of course, no clear reason for most human motives....

“One does....

“There is something dishonouring in distrust--to both the distrusted and the one who distrusts....”

After that, apparently, it had been too hot and stuffy to continue.

20