From such considerations Benham went on to speculate how far the crowd can be replaced in a man"s imagination, how far some subst.i.tute for that social backing can be made to serve the same purpose in neutralizing fear. He wrote with the calm of a man who weighs the probabilities of a riddle, and with the zeal of a man lost to every material consideration.
His writing, it seemed to White, had something of the enthusiastic whiteness of his face, the enthusiastic brightness of his eyes. We can no more banish fear from our being at present than we can carve out the fleshy pillars of the heart or the pineal gland in the brain. It is deep in our inheritance. As deep as hunger. And just as we have to satisfy hunger in order that it should leave us free, so we have to satisfy the unconquerable importunity of fear. We have to rea.s.sure our faltering instincts. There must be something to take the place of lair and familiars, something not ourselves but general, that we must carry with us into the lonely places. For it is true that man has now not only to learn to fight in open order instead of in a phalanx, but he has to think and plan and act in open order, to live in open order....
Then with one of his abrupt transitions Benham had written, "This brings me to G.o.d."
"The devil it does!" said White, roused to a keener attention.
"By no feat of intention can we achieve courage in loneliness so long as we feel indeed alone. An isolated man, an egoist, an Epicurean man, will always fail himself in the solitary place. There must be something more with us to sustain us against this vast universe than the spark of life that began yesterday and must be extinguished to-morrow. There can be no courage beyond social courage, the sustaining confidence of the herd, until there is in us the sense of G.o.d. But G.o.d is a word that covers a mult.i.tude of meanings. When I was a boy I was a pa.s.sionate atheist, I defied G.o.d, and so far as G.o.d is the mere sanction of social traditions and pressures, a mere dressing up of the crowd"s will in canonicals, I do still deny him and repudiate him. That G.o.d I heard of first from my nursemaid, and in very truth he is the proper G.o.d of all the nursemaids of mankind. But there is another G.o.d than that G.o.d of obedience, G.o.d the immortal adventurer in me, G.o.d who calls men from home and country, G.o.d scourged and crowned with thorns, who rose in a nail-pierced body out of death and came not to bring peace but a sword."
With something bordering upon intellectual consternation, White, who was a decent self-respecting sceptic, read these last clamberings of Benham"s spirit. They were written in pencil; they were unfinished when he died.
(Surely the man was not a Christian!)
"You may be heedless of death and suffering because you think you cannot suffer and die, or you may be heedless of death and pain because you have identified your life with the honour of mankind and the insatiable adventurousness of man"s imagination, so that the possible death is negligible and the possible achievement altogether outweighs it."...
White shook his head over these pencilled fragments.
He was a member of the Rationalist Press a.s.sociation, and he had always taken it for granted that Benham was an orthodox unbeliever. But this was hopelessly unsound, heresy, perilous stuff; almost, it seemed to him, a posthumous betrayal....
11
One night when he was in India the spirit of adventure came upon Benham.
He had gone with Kepple, of the forestry department, into the jungle country in the hills above the Tapti. He had been very anxious to see something of that aspect of Indian life, and he had s.n.a.t.c.hed at the chance Kepple had given him. But they had scarcely started before the expedition was brought to an end by an accident, Kepple was thrown by a pony and his ankle broken. He and Benham bandaged it as well as they could, and a litter was sent for, and meanwhile they had to wait in the camp that was to have been the centre of their jungle raids. The second day of this waiting was worse for Kepple than the first, and he suffered much from the pressure of this amateurish bandaging. In the evening Benham got cool water from the well and rearranged things better; the two men dined and smoked under their thatched roof beneath the big banyan, and then Kepple, tired out by his day of pain, was carried to his tent. Presently he fell asleep and Benham was left to himself.
Now that the heat was over he found himself quite indisposed to sleep.
He felt full of life and anxious for happenings.
He went back and sat down upon the iron bedstead beneath the banyan, that Kepple had lain upon through the day, and he watched the soft immensity of the Indian night swallow up the last lingering colours of the world. It left the outlines, it obliterated nothing, but it stripped off the superficial reality of things. The moon was full and high overhead, and the light had not so much gone as changed from definition and the blazing glitter and reflections of solidity to a translucent and unsubstantial clearness. The jungle that bordered the little encampment north, south, and west seemed to have crept a little nearer, enriched itself with blackness, taken to itself voices.
(Surely it had been silent during the day.)
A warm, faintly-scented breeze just stirred the dead gra.s.s and the leaves. In the day the air had been still.
Immediately after the sunset there had been a great crying of peac.o.c.ks in the distance, but that was over now; the crickets, however, were still noisy, and a persistent sound had become predominant, an industrious unmistakable sound, a sound that took his mind back to England, in midsummer. It was like a watchman"s rattle--a nightjar!
So there were nightjars here in India, too! One might have expected something less familiar. And then came another cry from far away over the heat-stripped tree-tops, a less familiar cry. It was repeated. Was that perhaps some craving leopard, a tiger cat, a panther?--
"HUNT, HUNT"; that might be a deer.
Then suddenly an angry chattering came from the dark trees quite close at hand. A monkey?...
These great, scarce visible, sweeping movements through the air were bats....
Of course, the day jungle is the jungle asleep. This was its waking hour. Now the deer were arising from their forms, the bears creeping out of their dens amidst the rocks and blundering down the gullies, the tigers and panthers and jungle cats stalking noiselessly from their lairs in the gra.s.s. Countless creatures that had hidden from the heat and pitiless exposure of the day stood now awake and alertly intent upon their purposes, grazed or sought water, flitting delicately through the moonlight and shadows. The jungle was awakening. Again Benham heard that sound like the belling of a stag....
This was the real life of the jungle, this night life, into which man did not go. Here he was on the verge of a world that for all the stuffed trophies of the sportsman and the specimens of the naturalist is still almost as unknown as if it was upon another planet. What intruders men are, what foreigners in the life of this ancient system!
He looked over his shoulder, and there were the two little tents, one that sheltered Kepple and one that awaited him, and beyond, in an irregular line, glowed the ruddy smoky fires of the men. One or two turbaned figures still flitted about, and there was a voice--low, monotonous--it must have been telling a tale. Further, sighing and stirring ever and again, were tethered beasts, and then a great pale s.p.a.ce of moonlight and the clumsy outlines of the village well. The cl.u.s.tering village itself slept in darkness beyond the mango trees, and still remoter the black encircling jungle closed in. One might have fancied this was the encampment of newly-come invaders, were it not for the larger villages that are overgrown with thickets and altogether swallowed up again in the wilderness, and for the deserted temples that are found rent asunder by the roots of trees and the ancient embankments that hold water only for the drinking of the sambur deer....
Benham turned his face to the dim jungle again....
He had come far out of his way to visit this strange world of the ancient life, that now recedes and dwindles before our new civilization, that seems fated to shrivel up and pa.s.s altogether before the dry advance of physical science and material organization. He was full of unsatisfied curiosities about its fierce hungers and pa.s.sions, its fears and cruelties, its instincts and its well-nigh incommunicable and yet most precious understandings. He had long ceased to believe that the wild beast is wholly evil, and safety and plenty the ultimate good for men....
Perhaps he would never get nearer to this mysterious jungle life than he was now.
It was intolerably tantalizing that it should be so close at hand and so inaccessible....
As Benham sat brooding over his disappointment the moon, swimming on through the still circle of the hours, pa.s.sed slowly over him. The lights and shadows about him changed by imperceptible gradations and a long pale alley where the native cart track drove into the forest, opened slowly out of the darkness, slowly broadened, slowly lengthened.
It opened out to him with a quality of invitation....
There was the jungle before him. Was it after all so inaccessible?
"Come!" the road said to him.
Benham rose and walked out a few paces into the moonlight and stood motionless.
Was he afraid?
Even now some hungry watchful monster might lurk in yonder shadows, watching with infinite still patience. Kepple had told him how they would sit still for hours--staring unblinkingly as cats stare at a fire--and then crouch to advance. Beneath the shrill overtone of the nightjars, what noiseless grey shapes, what deep breathings and cracklings and creepings might there not be?...
Was he afraid?
That question determined him to go.
He hesitated whether he should take a gun. A stick? A gun, he knew, was a dangerous thing to an inexperienced man. No! He would go now, even as he was with empty hands. At least he would go as far as the end of that band of moonlight. If for no other reason than because he was afraid.
NOW!
For a moment it seemed to him as though his feet were too heavy to lift and then, hands in pockets, khaki-clad, an almost invisible figure, he strolled towards the cart-track.
Come to that, he halted for a moment to regard the distant fires of the men. No one would miss him. They would think he was in his tent.
He faced the stirring quiet ahead. The cart-track was a rutted path of soft, warm sand, on which he went almost noiselessly. A bird squabbled for an instant in a thicket. A great white owl floated like a flake of moonlight across the track and vanished without a sound among the trees.
Along the moonlit path went Benham, and when he pa.s.sed near trees his footsteps became noisy with the rustle and crash of dead leaves. The jungle was full of moonlight; twigs, branches, creepers, gra.s.s-clumps came out acutely vivid. The trees and bushes stood in pools of darkness, and beyond were pale stretches of misty moonshine and big rocks shining with an unearthly l.u.s.tre. Things seemed to be clear and yet uncertain.
It was as if they dissolved or retired a little and then returned to solidity.
A sudden chattering broke out overhead, and black across the great stars soared a flying squirrel and caught a twig, and ran for shelter.
A second hesitated in a tree-top and pursued. They chased each other and vanished abruptly. He forgot his sense of insecurity in the interest of these active little silhouettes. And he noted how much bigger and more wonderful the stars can look when one sees them through interlacing branches.
Ahead was darkness; but not so dark when he came to it that the track was invisible. He was at the limit of his intention, but now he saw that that had been a childish project. He would go on, he would walk right into the jungle. His first disinclination was conquered, and the soft intoxication of the subtropical moonshine was in his blood.... But he wished he could walk as a spirit walks, without this noise of leaves....
Yes, this was very wonderful and beautiful, and there must always be jungles for men to walk in. Always there must be jungles....
Some small beast snarled and bolted from under his feet. He stopped sharply. He had come into a darkness under great boughs, and now he stood still as the little creature scuttled away. Beyond the track emerged into a dazzling whiteness....
In the stillness he could hear the deer belling again in the distance, and then came a fuss of monkeys in a group of trees near at hand. He remained still until this had died away into mutterings.
Then on the verge of movement he was startled by a ripe mango that slipped from its stalk and fell out of the tree and struck his hand.