THE NEW HAROUN AL RASCHID
1
Benham corresponded with Amanda until the summer of 1913.Sometimes the two wrote coldly to one another, sometimes with warm affection, sometimes with great bitterness.When he met White in Johannesburg durtter.Finally they invoked the manager.He was still contemplating the scene of the disorder when the precipitate retreat of his subordinates warned him of Benham's return.
Benham was smoking a cigarette and his bearing was reassuringly tranquil.
"I had a kind of nightmare," he said."I am fearfully sorry to have disarranged your room.You must charge me for the inconvenience as well as for the damage.
31
"An aristocrat cannot be a lover."
"One cannot serve at once the intricacies of the wider issues of life and the intricacies of another human being.I do not mean that one may not love.One loves the more because one does not concentrate one's love.One loves nations, the people passing in the street, beasts hurt by the wayside, troubled scoundrels and university dons in tears....
"But if one does not give one's whole love and life into a woman's hands I do not think one can expect to be loved.
"An aristocrat must do without close personal love...."This much was written at the top of a sheet of paper.The writing ended halfway down the page.Manifestly it was an abandoned beginning.And it was, it seemed to White, the last page of all this confusion of matter that dealt with the Second and Third Limitations.Its incompleteness made its expression perfect....
There Benham's love experience ended.He turned to the great business of the world.Desire and Jealousy should deflect his life no more; like Fear they were to be dismissed as far as possible and subdued when they could not be altogether dismissed.Whatever stirrings of blood or imagination there were in him after that parting, whatever failures from this resolution, they left no trace on the rest of his research, which was concerned with the hates of peoples and classes and war and peace and the possibilities science unveils and starry speculations of what mankind may do.
32
But Benham did not leave England again until he had had an encounter with Lady Marayne.
The little lady came to her son in a state of extraordinary anger and distress.Never had she seemed quite so resolute nor quite so hopelessly dispersed and mixed.And when for a moment it seemed to him that she was not as a matter of fact dispersed and mixed at all, then with an instant eagerness he dismissed that one elucidatory gleam."What are you doing in England, Poff?" she demanded."And what are you going to do?
"Nothing! And you are going to leave her in your house, with your property and a lover.If that's it, Poff, why did you ever come back? And why did you ever marry her? You might have known; her father was a swindler.She's begotten of deceit.She'll tell her own story while you are away, and a pretty story she'll make of it.""Do you want me to divorce her and make a scandal?""I never wanted you to go away from her.If you'd stayed and watched her as a man should, as I begged you and implored you to do.
Didn't I tell you, Poff? Didn't I warn you?""But now what am I to do?"
"There you are! That's just a man's way.You get yourself into this trouble, you follow your passions and your fancies and fads and then you turn to me! How can I help you now, Poff? If you'd listened to me before!"Her blue eyes were demonstratively round.
"Yes, but--"
"I warned you," she interrupted."I warned you.I've done all Icould for you.It isn't that I haven't seen through her.When she came to me at first with that made-up story of a baby! And all about loving me like her own mother.But I did what I could.Ithought we might still make the best of a bad job.And then--.Imight have known she couldn't leave Pip alone....But for weeks I didn't dream.I wouldn't dream.Right under my nose.The impudence of it!"Her voice broke."Such a horrid mess! Such a hopeless, horrid mess!"She wiped away a bright little tear....
"It's all alike.It's your way with us.All of you.There isn't a man in the world deserves to have a woman in the world.We do all we can for you.We do all we can to amuse you, we dress for you and we talk for you.All the sweet, warm little women there are! And then you go away from us! There never was a woman yet who pleased and satisfied a man, who did not lose him.Give you everything and off you must go! Lovers, mothers...."It dawned upon Benham dimly that his mother's troubles did not deal exclusively with himself.
"But Amanda," he began.
"If you'd looked after her properly, it would hing the strike period of 1913, he was on his way to see her in London and to settle their relationship upon a new and more definite footing.It was her suggestion that they should meet.
About her he felt an enormous, inexorable, dissatisfaction.He could not persuade himself that his treatmee evil between different kinds of men is due to uncultivated feeling, to natural bad feeling, but far more is it due to bad thinking." At times he seemed on the verge of the persuasion that most human trouble is really due to bad metaphysics.It was, one must remark, an extraordinary journey he had made; he had started from chivalry and arrived at metaphysics;every knight he held must be a logician, and ultimate bravery is courage of the mind.One thinks of his coming to this conclusion with knit brows and balancing intentness above whole gulfs of bathos--very much as he had once walked the Leysin Bisse....
"Men do not know how to think," he insisted--getting along the planks; "and they will not realize that they do not know how to think.Nine-tenths of the wars in the world have arisen out of misconceptions....Misconception is the sin and dishonour of the mind, and muddled thinking as ignoble as dirty conduct....
Infinitely more disastrous."
