The complete works, p.355
The Complete Works, page 355
And as these thoughts came back into his mind, Amanda flickered up from below, light and noiseless as a sunbeam, and stood behind his chair.
Freedom and the sight of the world had if possible brightened and invigorated her. Her costume and bearing were subtly touched by the romance of the Adriatic. There was a flavour of the pirate in the cloak about her shoulders and the light knitted cap of scarlet she had stuck upon her head. She surveyed his preoccupation for a moment, glanced forward, and then covered his eyes with her hands.
In almost the same movement she had bent down and nipped the tip of his ear between her teeth.
"Confound you, Amanda!"
"You'd forgotten my existence, you star-gazing Cheetah. And then, you see, these things happen to you!"
"I was thinking."
"Well--DON'T. . . . I distrust your thinking. This coast is wilder and grimmer than yesterday. It's glorious. . . ."
She sat down on the chair he unfolded for her.
"Is there nothing to eat?" she asked abruptly.
"It is too early."
2
"This coast is magnificent," she said presently.
"It's hideous," he answered. "It's as ugly as a heap of slag."
"It's nature at its wildest."
"That's Amanda at her wildest."
"Well, isn't it?"
"No! This land isn't nature. It's waste. Not wilderness. It's the other end. Those hills were covered with forests; this was a busy civilized coast just a little thousand years ago. The Venetians wasted it. They cut down the forests; they filled the cities with a mixed mud of population, THAT stuff. Look at it"!--he indicated the sleepers forward by a movement of his head.
"I suppose they WERE rather feeble people," said Amanda.
"Who?"
"The Venetians."
"They were traders--and nothing more. Just as we are. And when they were rich they got splendid clothes and feasted and rested.
Much as we do."
Amanda surveyed him. "We don't rest."
"We idle."
"We are seeing things."
"Don't be a humbug, Amanda. We are making love. Just as they did.
And it has been--ripping. In Salona they made love tremendously.
They did nothing else until the barbarians came over the mountains. . . ."
"Well," said Amanda virtuously, "we will do something else."
He made no answer and her expression became profoundly thoughtful.
Of course this wandering must end. He had been growing impatient for some time. But it was difficult, she perceived, to decide just what to do with him. . . .
Benham picked up the thread of his musing.
He was seeing more and more clearly that all civilization was an effort, and so far always an inadequate and very partially successful effort. Always it had been aristocratic, aristocratic in the sense that it was the work of minorities, who took power, who had a common resolution against the inertia, the indifference, the insubordination and instinctive hostility of the mass of mankind.
And always the set-backs, the disasters of civilization, had been failures of the aristocratic spirit. Why had the Roman purpose faltered and shrivelled? Every order, every brotherhood, every organization carried with it the seeds of its own destruction. Must the idea of statecraft and rule perpetually reappear, reclothe itself in new forms, age, die, even as life does--making each time its almost infinitesimal addition to human achievement? Now the world is crying aloud for a renascence of the spirit that orders and controls. Human affairs sway at a dizzy height of opportunity.
Will they keep their footing there, or stagger? We have got back at last to a time as big with opportunity as the early empire. Given only the will in men and it would be possible now to turn the dazzling accidents of science, the chancy attainments of the nineteenth century, into a sane and permanent possession, a new starting point. . . . What a magnificence might be made of life!
He was aroused by Amanda‘s voice.
"When we go back to London, old Cheetah," she said, "we must take a house."
For some moments he stared at her, trying to get back to their point of divergence.
"Why?" he asked at length.
"We must have a house," she said.
He looked at her face. Her expression was profoundly thoughtful, her eyes were fixed on the slumbering ships poised upon the transparent water under the mountain shadows.
"You see," she thought it out, "you've got to TELL in London. You can't just sneak back there. You've got to strike a note of your own. With all these things of yours."
"But how?"
"There's a sort of little house, I used to see them when I was a girl and my father lived in London, about Brook Street and that part. Not too far north. . . . You see going back to London for us is just another adventure. We've got to capture London. We've got to scale it. We've got advantages of all sorts. But at present we're outside. We've got to march in."
Her clear hazel eyes contemplated conflicts and triumphs.
She was roused by Benham s voice.
"What the deuce are you thinking of, Amanda?"
She turned her level eyes to his. "London," she said. "For you."
"I don't want London," he said.
"I thought you did. You ought to. I do."
"But to take a house! Make an invasion of London!"
"You dear old Cheetah, you can't be always frisking about in the wilderness, staring at the stars."
"But I'm not going back to live in London in the old way, theatres, dinner-parties, chatter--"
"Oh no! We aren't going to do that sort of thing. We aren't going to join the ruck. We'll go about in holiday times all over the world. I want to see Fusiyama. I mean to swim in the South Seas.
With you. We'll dodge the sharks. But all the same we shall have to have a house in London. We have to be FELT there."
She met his consternation fairly. She lifted her fine eyebrows.
Her little face conveyed a protesting reasonableness.
"Well, MUSTN'T we?"
She added, "If we want to alter the world we ought to live in the world."
Since last they had disputed the question she had thought out these new phrases.
"Amanda," he said, "I think sometimes you haven't the remotest idea of what I am after. I don't believe you begin to suspect what I am up to."
She put her elbows on her knees, dropped her chin between her hands and regarded him impudently. She had a characteristic trick of looking up with her face downcast that never failed to soften his regard.
"Look here, Cheetah, don't you give way to your early morning habit of calling your own true love a fool," she said.
"Simply I tell you I will not go back to London."
"You will go back with me, Cheetah."
"I will go back as far as my work calls me there."
"It calls you through the voice of your mate and slave and doormat to just exactly the sort of house you ought to have. . . . It is the privilege and duty of the female to choose the lair."
For a space Benham made no reply. This controversy had been gathering for some time and he wanted to state his view as vividly as possible. The Benham style of connubial conversation had long since decided for emphasis rather than delicacy.
"I think," he said slowly, "that this wanting to take London by storm is a beastly VULGAR thing to want to do."
Amanda compressed her lips.
"I want to work out things in my mind," he went on. "I do not want to be distracted by social things, and I do not want to be distracted by picturesque things. This life--it's all very well on the surface, but it isn't real. I'm not getting hold of reality.
Things slip away from me. God! but how they slip away from me!"
He got up and walked to the side of the boat.
She surveyed his back for some moments. Then she went and leant over the rail beside him.
"I want to go to London," she said.
"I don't."
"Where do you want to go?"
"Where I can see into the things that hold the world together."
"I have loved this wandering--I could wander always. But . . .
Cheetah! I tell you I WANT to go to London."
He looked over his shoulder into her warm face. "NO," he said.
"But, I ask you."
He shook his head.
She put her face closer and whispered. "Cheetah! big beast of my heart. Do you hear your mate asking for something?"
He turned his eyes back to the mountains. "I must go my own way."
"Haven't I, so far, invented things, made life amusing, Cheetah?
Can't you trust the leopard's wisdom?"
He stared at the coast inexorably.
"I wonder," she whispered.
"What?"
"You ARE that, Cheetah, that lank, long, EAGER beast--."
Suddenly with a nimble hand she had unbottoned and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. She stuck her pretty blue-veined arm before his eyes. "Look here, sir, it was you, wasn't it? It was your powerful jaw inflicted this bite upon the arm of a defenceless young leopardess--"
"Amanda!"
"Well." She wrinkled her brows.
He turned about and stood over her, he shook a finger in her face and there was a restrained intensity in his voice as he spoke.
"Look here, Amanda!" he said, "if you think that you are going to make me agree to any sort of project about London, to any sort of complication of our lives with houses in smart streets and a campaign of social assertion--by THAT, then may I be damned for an uxorious fool!"
Her eyes met his and there was mockery in her eyes.
"This, Cheetah, is the morning mood," she remarked.
"This is the essential mood. Listen, Amanda--"
He stopped short. He looked towards the gangway, they both looked.
The magic word "Breakfast" came simultaneously from them.
"Eggs," she said ravenously, and led the way.
A smell of coffee as insistent as an herald's trumpet had called a truce between them.
3
Their marriage had been a comparatively inconspicuous one, but since that time they had been engaged upon a honeymoon of great extent and variety. Their wedding had taken place at South Harting church in the marked absence of Lady Marayne, and it had been marred by only one untoward event. The Reverend Amos Pugh who, in spite of the earnest advice of several friends had insisted upon sharing in the ceremony, had suddenly covered his face with the sleeves of his surplice and fled with a swift rustle to the vestry, whence an uproar of inadequately smothered sorrow came as an obligato accompaniment to the more crucial passages of the service. Amanda appeared unaware of the incident at the time, but afterwards she explained things to Benham. "Curates," she said, "are such pent-up men. One ought, I suppose, to remember that. But he never had anything to go upon at all--not anything--except his own imaginations."
"I suppose when you met him you were nice to him."
"I was nice to him, of course. . . ."
They drove away from Harting, as it were, over the weeping remains of this infatuated divine. His sorrow made them thoughtful for a time, and then Amanda nestled closer to her lover and they forgot about him, and their honeymoon became so active and entertaining that only very rarely and transitorily did they ever think of him again.
The original conception of their honeymoon had been identical with the plans Benham had made for the survey and study of the world, and it was through a series of modifications, replacements and additions that it became at last a prolonged and very picturesque tour in Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, North Italy, and down the Adriatic coast. Amanda had never seen mountains, and longed, she said, to climb. This took them first to Switzerland. Then, in spite of their exalted aims, the devotion of their lives to noble purposes, it was evident that Amanda had no intention of scamping the detail of love, and for that what background is so richly beautiful as Italy? An important aspect of the grand tour round the world as Benham had planned it, had been interviews, inquiries and conversations with every sort of representative and understanding person he could reach. An unembarrassed young man who wants to know and does not promise to bore may reach almost any one in that way, he is as impersonal as pure reason and as mobile as a letter, but the presence of a lady in his train leaves him no longer unembarrassed. His approach has become a social event. The wife of a great or significant personage must take notice or decide not to take notice. Of course Amanda was prepared to go anywhere, just as Benham's shadow; it was the world that was unprepared. And a second leading aspect of his original scheme had been the examination of the ways of government in cities and the shifting and mixture of nations and races. It would have led to back streets, and involved and complicated details, and there was something in the fine flame of girlhood beside him that he felt was incompatible with those shadows and that dust. And also they were lovers and very deeply in love. It was amazing how swiftly that draggled shameful London sparrow-gamin, Eros, took heart from Amanda, and became wonderful, beautiful, glowing, life-giving, confident, clear-eyed; how he changed from flesh to sweet fire, and grew until he filled the sky.
So that you see they went to Switzerland and Italy at last very like two ordinary young people who were not aristocrats at all, had no theory about the world or their destiny, but were simply just ardently delighted with the discovery of one another.
Nevertheless Benham was for some time under a vague impression that in a sort of way still he was going round the world and working out his destinies.
It was part of the fascination of Amanda that she was never what he had supposed her to be, and that nothing that he set out to do with her ever turned out as they had planned it. Her appreciations marched before her achievement, and when it came to climbing it seemed foolish to toil to summits over which her spirit had flitted days before. Their Swiss expeditions which she had foreseen as glorious wanderings amidst the blue ice of crevasses and nights of exalted hardihood became a walking tour of fitful vigour and abundant fun and delight. They spent a long day on the ice of the Aletsch glacier, but they reached the inn on its eastward side with magnificent appetites a little late for dinner.
Amanda had revealed an unexpected gift for nicknames and pretty fancies. She named herself the Leopard, the spotless Leopard; in some obscure way she intimated that the colour was black, but that was never to be admitted openly, there was supposed to be some lurking traces of a rusty brown but the word was spotless and the implication white, a dazzling white, she would play a thousand variations on the theme; in moments of despondency she was only a black cat, a common lean black cat, and sacks and half-bricks almost too good for her. But Benham was always a Cheetah. That had come to her as a revelation from heaven. But so clearly he was a Cheetah. He was a Hunting Leopard; the only beast that has an upcast face and dreams and looks at you with absent-minded eyes like a man. She laced their journeys with a fantastic monologue telling in the third person what the Leopard and the Cheetah were thinking and seeing and doing. And so they walked up mountains and over passes and swam in the warm clear water of romantic lakes and loved each other mightily always, in chestnut woods and olive orchards and flower-starred alps and pine forests and awning-covered boats, and by sunset and moonlight and starshine; and out of these agreeable solitudes they came brown and dusty, striding side by side into sunlit entertaining fruit-piled market-places and envious hotels.
For days and weeks together it did not seem to Benham that there was anything that mattered in life but Amanda and the elemental joys of living. And then the Research Magnificent began to stir in him again. He perceived that Italy was not India, that the clue to the questions he must answer lay in the crowded new towns that they avoided, in the packed bookshops and the talk of men, and not in the picturesque and flowery solitudes to which their lovemaking carried them.
Moods began in which he seemed to forget Amanda altogether.
This happened first in the Certosa di Pavia whither they had gone one afternoon from Milan. That was quite soon after they were married. They had a bumping journey thither in a motor-car, a little doubtful if the excursion was worth while, and they found a great amazement in the lavish beauty and decorative wealth of that vast church and its associated cloisters, set far away from any population as it seemed in a flat wilderness of reedy ditches and patchy cultivation. The distilleries and outbuildings were deserted--their white walls were covered by one monstrously great and old wisteria in flower--the soaring marvellous church was in possession of a knot of unattractive guides. One of these conducted them through the painted treasures of the gold and marble chapels; he was an elderly but animated person who evidently found Amanda more wonderful than any church. He poured out great accumulations of information and compliments before her. Benham dropped behind, went astray and was presently recovered dreaming in the great cloister. The guide showed them over two of the cells that opened thereupon, each a delightful house for a solitary, bookish and clean, and each with a little secret walled garden of its own. He was covertly tipped against all regulations and departed regretfulry with a beaming dismissal from Amanda. She found Benham wondering why the Carthusians had failed to produce anything better in the world than a liqueur. "One might have imagined that men would have done something in this beautiful quiet; that there would have come thought from here or will from here."
