The complete works, p.351
The Complete Works, page 351
Benham had some Benedictine!
One could not slight such sympathetic helpfulness. The Benedictine was genuine. And then came the coffee.
The cup of coffee was generously conceived and honestly made.
A night of clear melancholy ensued. . . .
17
Hitherto Benham had not faced in any detail the problem of how to break with Mrs. Skelmersdale. Now he faced it pessimistically. She would, he knew, be difficult to break with. (He ought never to have gone there to lunch.) There would be something ridiculous in breaking off. In all sorts of ways she might resist. And face to face with her he might find himself a man divided against himself.
That opened preposterous possibilities. On the other hand it was out of the question to do the business by letter. A letter hits too hard; it lies too heavy on the wound it has made. And in money matters he could be generous. He must be generous. At least financial worries need not complicate her distresses of desertion.
But to suggest such generosities on paper, in cold ink, would be outrageous. And, in brief--he ought not to have gone there to lunch. After that he began composing letters at a great rate.
Delicate--explanatory. Was it on the whole best to be explanatory? . . .
It was going to be a tremendous job, this breaking with her. And it had begun so easily. . . .
There was, he remembered with amazing vividness, a little hollow he had found under her ear, and how when he kissed her there it always made her forget her worries and ethical problems for a time and turn to him. . . .
"No," he said grimly, "it must end," and rolled over and stared at the black. . . .
Like an insidious pedlar, that old rascal whom young literary gentlemen call the Great God Pan, began to spread his wares in the young man's memory. . . .
After long and feverish wanderings of the mind, and some talking to himself and walking about the room, he did at last get a little away from Mrs. Skelmersdale.
He perceived that when he came to tell his mother about this journey around the world there would be great difficulties. She would object very strongly, and if that did not do then she would become extremely abusive, compare him to his father, cry bitterly, and banish him suddenly and heartbrokenly from her presence for ever.
She had done that twice already--once about going to the opera instead of listening to a lecture on Indian ethnology and once about a week-end in Kent. . . . He hated hurting his mother, and he was beginning to know now how easily she was hurt. It is an abominable thing to hurt one's mother--whether one has a justification or whether one hasn't.
Recoiling from this, he was at once resumed by Mrs. Skelmersdale.
Who had in fact an effect of really never having been out of the room. But now he became penitent about her. His penitence expanded until it was on a nightmare scale. At last it blotted out the heavens. He felt like one of those unfortunate victims of religious mania who are convinced they have committed the Sin against the Holy Ghost. (Why had he gone there to lunch? That was the key to it.
WHY had he gone there to lunch?) . . . He began to have remorse for everything, for everything he had ever done, for everything he he give in to
sex.
It's the same thing really. The misleading of instinct."
This set the key of his thought throughout the afternoon--until Amanda happened to him.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
AMANDA
1
Amanda happened to Benham very suddenly.
From Haslemere he had gone on to further heaths and gorse beyond Liphook, and thence he had wandered into a pretty district beset with Hartings. He had foh socialistic art as
bookbinding. They were clearly ‘advanced' people. And Amanda was tremendously important to them, she was their light, their pride, their most living thing. They focussed on her. When he talked to them all in general he talked to her in particular. He felt that some introduction of himself was due to these welcoming people. He tried to give it mixed with an itinerary and a sketch of his experiences. He praised the heather country and Harting Coombe and the Hartings. He told them that London had suddenly become intolerable--"In the spring sunshine."
"You live in London?" said Mrs. Wilder.
Yes. ad
ever not done, for everything in the world. In a moment of lucidity he even had remorse for drinking that stout honest cup of black coffee. . . .
And so on and so on and so on. . . .
When daylight came it found Benham still wide awake. Things crept mournfully out of the darkness into a reproachful clearness. The sound of birds that had been so delightful on the yesterday was now no longer agreeable. The thrushes, he thought, repeated themselves a great deal.
He fell asleep as it seemed only a few minutes before the landlord, accompanied by a great smell of frying bacon, came to call him.
18
The second day opened rather dully for Benham. There was not an idea left in his head about anything in the world. It was--SOLID.
He walked through Bramley and Godalming and Witley and so came out upon the purple waste of Hindhead. He strayed away from the road and found a sunny place of turf amidst the heather and lay down and slept for an hour or so. He arose refreshed. He got some food at the Huts Inn on the Hindhead crest and went on across sunlit heathery wildernesses variegated by patches of spruce and fir and silver birch. And then suddenly his mental inanition was at an end and his thoughts were wide and brave again. He was astonished that for a moment he could have forgotten that he was vowed to the splendid life.
"Continence by preoccupation;" he tried the phrase. . . .
"A man must not give in to fear; neither must hund himself upon a sandy ridge
looking very
beautifully into a sudden steep valley that he learnt was Harting Coombe; he had been through a West Harting and a South Harting and read finger-posts pointing to others of the clan; and in the evening, at the foot of a steep hill where two roads met, he sat down to consider whether he should go back and spend the night in one of the two kindly-looking inns of the latter place or push on over the South Downs towards the unknown luck of Singleton or Chichester. As he sat down two big retrievers, black and brown, came headlong down the road. The black carried a stick, the brown disputed and pursued. As they came abreast of him the foremost a little relaxed his hold, the pursuer grabbed at it, and in an instant the rivalry had flared to rage and a first-class dogfight was in progress.
Benham detested dog-fights. He stood up, pale and distressed. "Lie down!" he cried. "Shut up, you brutes!" and was at a loss for further action.
Then it was Amanda leapt into his world, a light, tall figure of a girl, fluttering a short petticoat. Hatless she was, brown, flushed, and her dark hair tossing loose, and in a moment she had the snarling furious dogs apart, each gripped firmly by its collar.
Then with a wriggle black was loose and had closed again. Inspired by the best traditions of chivalry Benham came to her assistance.
He was not expert with dogs. He grasped the black dog under its ear. He was bitten in the wrist, rather in excitement than malice, and with a certain excess of zeal he was strangling the brute before you could count ten.
Amanda seized the fallen stick and whacked the dog she held, reasonably but effectively until its yelps satisfied her. "There!"
she said pitching her victim from her, and stood erect again. She surveyed the proceedings of her helper for the first time.
"You needn't," she said, "choke Sultan anymore."
"Ugh!" she said, as though that was enough for Sultan. And peace was restored.
"I'm obliged to you. But-- . . . I say! He didn't bite you, did he? Oh, SULTAN!"
Sultan tried to express his disgust at the affair. Rotten business.
When a fellow is fighting one can't be meticulous. And if people come interfering. Still--SORRY! So Sultan by his code of eye and tail.
"May I see? . . . Something ought to be done to this. . . ."
She took his wrist in her hand, and her cheek and eyelashes came within a foot of his face.
Some observant element in his composition guessed, and guessed quite accurately, that she was nineteen. . . .
2
She had an eyebrow like a quick stroke of a camel's-hair brush, she had a glowing face, half childish imp, half woman, she had honest hazel eyes, a voice all music, a manifest decision of character.
And he must have this bite seen to at once. She lived not five minutes away. He must come with her.
She had an aunt who behaved like a mother and a mother who behaved like a genteel visitor, and they both agreed with Amanda that although Mr. Walter Long and his dreadful muzzles and everything did seem to have stamped out rabies, yet you couldn't be too careful with a dog bite. A dog bite might be injurious in all sorts of ways--particularly Sultan's bite. He was, they had to confess, a dog without refinement, a coarse-minded omnivorous dog. Both the elder ladies insisted upon regarding Benham's wound as clear evidence of some gallant rescue of Aman And he had wanted to think things out.
In London one could do
no thinking--
"Here we do nothing else," said Amanda.
"Except dog-fights," said the elder cousin.
"I thought I would just wander and think and sleep in the open air.
Have you ever tried to sleep in the open air?"
"In the summer we all do," said the younger cousin. "Amanda makes us. We go out on to the little lawn at the back."
"You see Amanda has some friends at Limpsfield. And there they all go ouda from imminent danger--
"she's always so RECKLESS with those dogs," as though Amanda was not manifestly capable of taking care of herself; and when he had been Listerined and bandaged, they would have it that he should join them at their supper-dinner, which was already prepared and waiting.
They treated him as if he were still an undergraduate, they took his arrangements in hand as though he was a favourite nephew. He must stay in Harting that night. Both the Ship and the Coach and Horses were excellent inns, and over the Downs there would be nothing for miles and miles. . . .
The house was a little long house with a verandah and a garden in front of it with flint-edged paths; the room in which they sat and ate was long and low and equipped with pieces of misfitting good furniture, an accidental-looking gilt tarnished mirror, and a sprinkling of old and middle-aged books. Some one had lit a fire, which cracked and spurted about cheerfully in a motherly fireplace, and a lamp and some candles got lit. Mrs. Wilder, Amanda's aunt, a comfortable dark broad-browed woman, directed things, and sat at the end of the table and placed Benham on her right hand between herself and Amanda. Amanda's mother remained undeveloped, a watchful little woman with at least an eyebrow like her daughter's. Her name, it seemed, was Morris. No servant appeared, but two cousins of a vague dark picturesqueness and with a stamp of thirty upon them, the first young women Benham had ever seen dressed in djibbahs, sat at the table or moved about and attended to the simple needs of the service. The reconciled dogs were in the room and shifted inquiring noses from one human being to another.
Amanda's people were so easy and intelligent and friendly, and Benham after his thirty hours of silence so freshly ready for human association, that in a very little while he could have imagined he had known and trusted this household for years. He had never met such people before, and yet there was something about them that seemed familiar--and then it occurred to him that something of their easy-going freedom was to be found in Russian novels. A photographic enlargement of somebody with a vegetarian expression of face and a special kind of slouch hat gave the atmosphere a flavour of Socialism, and a press and tools and stamps and pigments on an oak table in the corner suggested some suct and camp and sleep in the woods."
"Of course," reflected Mrs. Wilder, "in April it must be different."
"It IS different," said Benham with feeling; "the night comes five hours too soon. And it comes wet." He described his experiences and his flight to Shere and the kindly landlord and the cup of coffee. "And after that I thought with a vengeance."
"Do you write things?" asked Amanda abruptly, and it seemed to him with a note of hope.
"No. No, it was just a private puzzle. It was something I couldn't get straight."
"And you have got it straight?" asked Amanda.
"I think so."
"You were making up your mind about something?"
"Amanda DEAR!" cried her mother.
"Oh! I don't mind telling you," said Benham.
They seemed such unusual people that he was moved to unusual confidences. They had that effect one gets at times with strangers freshly met as though they were not really in the world. And there was something about Amanda that made him want to explain himself to her completely.
"What I wanted to think about was what I should do with my life."
"Haven't you any WORK--?" asked the elder cousin.
"None that I'm obliged to do."
"That's where a man has the advantage," said Amanda with the tone of profound reflection. "You can choose. And what are you going to do with your life?"
"Amanda," her mother protested, "really you mustn't!"
"I'm going round the world to think about it," Benham told her.
"I'd give my soul to travel," said Amanda.
She addressed her remark to the salad in front of her.
"But have you no ties?" asked Mrs. Wilder.
"None that hold me," said Benham. "I'm one of those unfortunates who needn't do anything at all. I'm independent. You see my riddles. East and west and north and south, it's all my way for the taking. There's not an indication."
"If I were you," said Amanda, and reflected. Then she half turned herself to him. "I should go first to India," she said, "and I should shoot, one, two, three, yes, three tigers. And then I would see Farukhabad Sikri--I was reading in a book about it yesterday--where the jungle grows in the palaces; and then I would go right up the Himalayas, and then, then I would have a walking tour in Japan, and then I would sail in a sailing ship down to Borneo and Java and set myself up as a Ranee-- . . . And then I would think what I would do next."
"All alone, Amanda?" asked Mrs. Wilder.
"Only when I shoot tigers. You and mother should certainly come to Japan."
"But Mr. Benham perhaps doesn't intend to shoot tigers, Amanda?"
said Amanda's mother.
"Not at once. My way will be a little different. I think I shall go first through Germany. And then down to Constantinople. And then I've some idea of getting across Asia Minor and Persia to India. That would take some time. One must ride."
"Asia Minor ought to be fun," said Amanda. "But I should prefer India because of the tigers. It would be so jolly to begin with the tigers right away."
"It is the towns and governments and peoples I want to see rather than tigers," said Benham. "Tigers if they are in the programme.
But I want to find out about--other things."
"Don't you think there's something to be found out at home?" said the elder cousin, blushing very brightly and speaking with the effort of one who speaks for conscience' sake.
"Betty's a Socialist," Amanda said to Benham with a suspicion of apology.
"Well, we're all rather that," Mrs. Wilder protested.
"If you are free, if you are independent, then don't you owe something to the workers?" Betty went on, getting graver and redder with each word.
"It's just because of that," said Benham, "that I am going round the world."
3
He was as free with these odd people as if he had been talking to Prothero. They were--alert. And he had been alone and silent and full of thinking for two clear days. He tried to explain why he found Socialism at once obvious and inadequate. . . .
Presently the supper things got themselves put away and the talk moved into a smaller room with several armchairs and a fire. Mrs.
Wilder and the cousins and Amanda each smoked a cigarette as if it were symbolical, and they were joined by a grave grey-bearded man with a hyphenated name and slightly Socratic manner, dressed in a very blue linen shirt and collar, a very woolly mustard-coloured suit and loose tie, and manifestly devoted to one of those branches of exemplary domestic decoration that grow upon Socialist soil in England. He joined Betty in the opinion that the duty of a free and wealthy young man was to remain in England and give himself to democratic Socialism and the abolition of "profiteering." "Consider that chair," he said. But Benham had little feeling for the craftsmanship of chairs.
