The complete works, p.344
The Complete Works, page 344
"Does your mother live in the country?" she asked, and took her peas with fastidious exactness.
Prothero coloured brightly. "She lives in London."
"All the year?"
"All the year."
"But isn't it dreadfully hot in town in the summer?"
Prothero had an uncomfortable sense of being very red in the face.
This kept him red. "We're suburban people," he said.
"But I thought--isn't there the seaside?"
"My mother has a business," said Prothero, redder than ever.
"O-oh!" said Lady Marayne. "What fun that must be for her?"
"It's a real business, and she has to live by it. Sometimes it's a worry."
"But a business of her own!" She surveyed the confusion of his visage with a sweet intelligence. "Is it an amusing sort of business, Mr. Prothero?"
Prothero looked mulish. "My mother is a dressmaker," he said. "In Brixton. She doesn't do particularly badly--or well. I live on my scholarship. I have lived on scholarships since I was thirteen.
And you see, Lady Marayne, Brixton is a poor hunting country."
Lady Marayne felt she had unmasked Prothero almost indecently.
Whatever happened there must be no pause. There must be no sign of a hitch.
"But it's good at tennis," she said. "You DO play tennis, Mr.
Prothero?"
"I--I gesticulate," said Prothero.
Lady Marayne, still in flight from that pause, went off at a tangent.
"Poff, my dear," she said, "I've had a diving-board put at the deep end of the pond."
The remark hung unanswered for a moment. The transition had been too quick for Benham's state of mind.
"Do you swim, Mr. Prothero?" the lady asked, though a moment before she had determined that she would never ask him a question again.
But this time it was a lucky question.
"Prothero mopped up the lot of us at Minchinghampton with his diving and swimming," Benham explained, and the tension was relaxed.
Lady Marayne spoke of her own swimming, and became daring and amusing at her difficulties with local feeling when first she swam in the pond. The high road ran along the far side of the pond--"And it didn't wear a hedge or anything," said Lady Marayne. "That was what they didn't quite like. Swimming in an undraped pond. . . ."
Prothero had been examined enough. Now he must be entertained. She told stories about the village people in her brightest manner. The third story she regretted as soon as she was fairly launched upon it; it was how she had interviewed the village dressmaker, when Sir Godfrey insisted upon her supporting local industries. It was very amusing but technical. The devil had put it into her head. She had to go through with it. She infused an extreme innocence into her eyes and fixed them on Prothero, although she felt a certain deepening pinkness in her cheeks was betraying her, and she did not look at Benham until her unhappy, but otherwise quite amusing anecdote, was dead and gone and safely buried under another. . . .
But people ought not to go about having dressmakers for mothers. . . .
And coming into other people's houses and influencing their sons. . . .
8
That night when everything was over Billy sat at the writing-table of his sumptuous bedroom--the bed was gilt wood, the curtains of the three great windows were tremendous, and there was a cheval glass that showed the full length of him and seemed to look over his head for more,--and meditated upon this visit of his. It was more than he had been prepared for. It was going to be a great strain. The sleek young manservant in an alpaca jacket, who said "Sir" whenever you looked at him, and who had seized upon and unpacked Billy's most private Gladstone bag without even asking if he might do so, and put away and displayed Billy's things in a way that struck Billy as faintly ironical, was unexpected. And it was unexpected that the brown suit, with its pockets stuffed with Billy's personal and confidential sundries, had vanished. And apparently a bath in a bathroom far down the corridor was prescribed for him in the morning; he hadn't thought of a dressing-gown. And after one had dressed, what did one do? Did one go down and wander about the house looking for the breakfast-room or wait for a gong? Would Sir Godfrey read Family Prayers? And afterwards did one go out or hang about to be entertained? He knew now quite clearly that those wicked blue eyes would mark his every slip. She did not like him.
She did not like him, he supposed, because he was common stuff. He didn't play up to her world and her. He was a discord in this rich, cleverly elaborate household. You could see it in the servants'
attitudes. And he was committed to a week of this.
Billy puffed out his cheeks to blow a sigh, and then decided to be angry and say "Damn!"
This way of living which made him uncomfortable was clearly an irrational and objectionable way of living. It was, in a cumbersome way, luxurious. But the waste of life of it, the servants, the observances, all concentrated on the mere detail of existence?
There came a rap at the door. Benham appeared, wearing an expensive-looking dressing-jacket which Lady Marayne had bought for him. He asked if he might talk for a bit and smoke. He sat down in a capacious chintz-covered easy chair beside Prothero, lit a cigarette, and came to the point after only a trivial hesitation.
"Prothero," he said, "you know what my father is."
"I thought he ran a preparatory school."
There was the profoundest resentment in Prothero' s voice.
"And, all the same, I'm going to be a rich man."
"I don't understand," said Prothero, without any shadow of congratulation.
Benham told Prothero as much as his mother had conveyed to him of the resources of his wealth. Her version had been adapted to his tender years and the delicacies of her position. The departed Nolan had become an eccentric godfather. Benham's manner was apologetic, and he made it clear that only recently had these facts come to him.
He had never suspected that he had had this eccentric godfather. It altered the outlook tremendously. It was one of the reasons that made Benham glad to have Prothero there, one wanted a man of one's own age, who understood things a little, to try over one's new ideas. Prothero listened with an unamiable expression.
"What would you do, Prothero, if you found yourself saddled with some thousands a year?"
"Godfathers don't grow in Brixton," said Prothero concisely.
"Well, what am I to do, Prothero?"
"Does all THIS belong to you?"
"No, this is my mother's."
"Godfather too?"
"I've not thought. . . . I suppose so. Or her own."
Prothero meditated.
"THIS life," he said at last, "this large expensiveness-- . . ."
He left his criticism unfinished.
"I agree. It suits my mother somehow. I can't understand her living in any other way. But--for me. . . ."
"What can one do with several thousands a year?"
Prothero's interest in this question presently swamped his petty personal resentments. "I suppose," he said, "one might have rather a lark with money like that. One would be free to go anywhere. To set all sorts of things going. . . . It's clear you can't sell all you have and give it to the poor. That is pauperization nowadays.
You might run a tremendously revolutionary paper. A real upsetting paper. How many thousands is it?"
"I don't know. SOME."
Prothero's interest was growing as he faced the possibilities.
"I've dreamt of a paper," he said, "a paper that should tell the brute truth about things."
"I don't know that I'm particularly built to be a journalist,"
Benham objected.
"You're not," said Billy. . . . "You might go into Parliament as a perfectly independent member. . . . Only you wouldn't get in. . . ."
"I'm not a speaker," said Benham.
"Of course," said Billy, "if you don't decide on a game, you'll just go on like this. You'll fall into a groove, you'll--you'll hunt.
You'll go to Scotland for the grouse."
For the moment Prothero had no further suggestions.
Benham waited for a second or so before he broached his own idea.
"Why, first of all, at any rate, Billy, shouldn't one use one's money to make the best of oneself? To learn things that men without money and leisure find it difficult to learn? By an accident, however unjust it is, one is in the position of a leader and a privileged person. Why not do one's best to give value as that?"
"Benham, that's the thin end of aristocracy!"
"Why not?"
"I hate aristocracy. For you it means doing what you like. While you are energetic you will kick about and then you will come back to this."
"That's one's own look-out," said Benham, after reflection.
"No, it's bound to happen."
Benham retreated a little from the immediate question.
"Well, we can't suddenly at a blow change the world. If it isn't to be plutocracy to-day it has to be aristocracy."
Prothero frowned over this, and then he made a sweeping proposition.
"YOU CANNOT HAVE ARISTOCRACY," he said, "BECAUSE, YOU
SEE--ALL MEN
ARE RIDICULOUS. Democracy has to fight its way out from under plutocracy. There is nothing else to be done."
"But a man in my position--?"
"It's a ridiculous position. You may try to escape being ridiculous. You won't succeed."
It seemed to Benham for a moment as though Prothero had got to the bottom of the question, and then he perceived that he had only got to the bottom of himself. Benham was pacing the floor.
He turned at the open window, held out a long forefinger, and uttered his countervailing faith.
"Even if he is ridiculous, Prothero, a man may still be an aristocrat. A man may anyhow be as much of an aristocrat as he can be."
Prothero reflected. "No," he said, "it sounds all right, but it's wrong. I hate all these advantages and differences and distinctions. A man's a man. What you say sounds well, but it's the beginning of pretension, of pride--"
He stopped short.
"Better, pride than dishonour," said Benham, "better the pretentious life than the sordid life. What else is there?"
"A life isn't necessarily sordid because it isn't pretentious," said Prothero, his voice betraying a defensive disposition.
"But a life with a large income MUST be sordid unless it makes some sort of attempt to be fine. . . ."
9
By transitions that were as natural as they were complicated and untraceable Prothero found his visit to Chexington developing into a tangle of discussions that all ultimately resolved themselves into an antagonism of the democratic and the aristocratic idea. And his part was, he found, to be the exponent of the democratic idea. The next day he came down early, his talk with Benham still running through his head, and after a turn or so in the garden he was attracted to the front door by a sound of voices, and found Lady Marayne had been up still earlier and was dismounting from a large effective black horse. This extorted an unwilling admiration from him. She greeted him very pleasantly and made a kind of introduction of her steed. There had been trouble at a gate, he was a young horse and fidgeted at gates; the dispute was still bright in her. Benham she declared was still in bed. "Wait till I have a mount for him." She reappeared fitfully in the breakfast-room, and then he was left to Benham until just before lunch. They read and afterwards, as the summer day grew hot, they swam in the nude pond.
She joined them in the water, splashing about in a costume of some elaboration and being very careful not to wet her hair. Then she came and sat with them on the seat under the big cedar and talked with them in a wrap that was pretty rather than prudish and entirely unmotherly. And she began a fresh attack upon him by asking him if he wasn't a Socialist and whether he didn't want to pull down Chexington and grow potatoes all over the park.
This struck Prothero as an inadequate statement of the Socialist project and he made an unsuccessful attempt to get it amended.
The engagement thus opened was renewed with great energy at lunch.
Sir Godfrey had returned to London and the inmost aspect of his fellow-creatures, but the party of three was supplemented by a vague young lady from the village and an alert agent from the neighbouring Tentington estate who had intentions about a cottage. Lady Marayne insisted upon regarding Socialism as a proposal to reinaugurate the first French Revolution, as an inversion of society so that it would be bottom upward, as an attack upon rule, order, direction. "And what good are all these proposals? If you had the poor dear king beheaded, you'd only get a Napoleon. If you divided all the property up between everybody, you'd have rich and poor again in a year."
Billy perceived no way of explaining away this version of his Socialism that would not involve uncivil contradictions--and nobody ever contradicted Lady Marayne.
"But, Lady Marayne, don't you think there is a lot of disorder and injustice in the world?" he protested.
"There would be ever so much more if your Socialists had their way."
"But still, don't you think-- . . ."
It is unnecessary even to recapitulate these universal controversies of our time. The lunch-table and the dinner-table and the general talk of the house drifted more and more definitely at its own level in the same direction as the private talk of Prothero and Benham, towards the antagonism of the privileged few and the many, of the trained and traditioned against the natural and undisciplined, of aristocracy against democracy. At the week-end Sir Godfrey returned to bring fresh elements. He said that democracy was unscientific.
"To deny aristocracy is to deny the existence of the fittest. It is on the existence of the fittest that progress depends."
"But do our social conditions exalt the fittest?" asked Prothero.
"That is another question," said Benham.
"Exactly," said Sir Godfrey. "That is another question. But speaking with some special knowledge, I should say that on the whole the people who are on the top of things OUGHT to be on the top of things. I agree with Aristotle that there is such a thing as a natural inferior."
"So far as I can understand Mr. Prothero," said Lady Marayne, "he thinks that all the inferiors are the superiors and all the superiors inferior. It's quite simple. . . ."
It made Prothero none the less indignant with this, that there was indeed a grain of truth in it. He hated superiors, he felt for inferiors.
10
At last came the hour of tipping. An embarrassed and miserable Prothero went slinking about the house distributing unexpected gold.
It was stupid, it was damnable; he had had to borrow the money from his mother. . . .
Lady Marayne felt he had escaped her. The controversy that should have split these two young men apart had given them a new interest in each other. When afterwards she sounded her son, very delicately, to see if indeed he was aware of the clumsiness, the social ignorance and uneasiness, the complete unsuitability of his friend, she could get no more from him than that exasperating phrase, "He has ideas!"
What are ideas? England may yet be ruined by ideas.
He ought never to have gone to Trinity, that monster packet of everything. He ought to have gone to some little GOOD college, good all through. She ought to have asked some one who KNEW.
11
One glowing afternoon in October, as these two young men came over Magdalen Bridge after a long disputatious and rather tiring walk to Drayton--they had been talking of Eugenics and the "family"--Benham was almost knocked down by an American trotter driven by Lord Breeze. "Whup there!" said Lord Breeze in a voice deliberately brutal, and Benham, roused from that abstraction which is partly fatigue, had to jump aside and stumbled against the parapet as the gaunt pacer went pounding by.
Lord Breeze grinned the sort of grin a man remembers. And passed.
"Damnation!" said Benham with a face that had become suddenly very white.
Then presently. "Any fool can do that who cares to go to the trouble."
"That," said Prothero, taking up their unquenchable issue, "that is the feeling of democracy."
"I walk because I choose to," said Benham.
The thing rankled.
"This equestrianism," he began, "is a matter of time and money--time even more than money. I want to read. I want to deal with ideas. . . .
"Any fool can drive. . . ."
