"WALK."
"I ought to do these papers."
"You weren"t doing them."
"No...."
"Walk with me to Grantchester. All this affliction of yours is--horrid--and just nothing at all. Come out of it! I want you to come with me to Russia and about the world. I"m going to leave my wife--"
"Leave your wife!"
"Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead you are in this disgusting state. I"ve never met anything in my life so hot and red and shiny and shameless. Come out of it, man! How can one talk to you?"
10
"You pull things down to your own level," said Benham as they went through the heat to Grantchester.
"I pull them down to truth," panted Prothero.
"Truth! As though being full of gross appet.i.tes was truth, and discipline and training some sort of falsity!"
"Artificiality. And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig"s pride."
For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....
The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the background by the impa.s.sioned materialism of Prothero.
"I"m not talking of Love," he said, remaining persistently outrageous.
"I"m talking of physical needs. That first. What is the good of arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is physically possible....
"But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?"
"Then why don"t we up and find out?" said Billy.
He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that surrounded these questions. We didn"t worship our ancestors when it came to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? "What is the wisdom of the ages?" said Prothero. "Think of the corners where that wisdom was born.... Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels.... Wandering wise man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic...."
"Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?" protested Benham.
The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter experience. Most of it was better forgotten. It didn"t convince. It had never worked things out. In this matter just as in every other matter that really signified things had still to be worked out. Nothing had been worked out hitherto. The wisdom of the ages was a Cant. People had been too busy quarrelling, fighting and running away. There wasn"t any digested experience of the ages at all. Only the mis-remembered hankey-pankey of the Dead Old Man.
"Is this love-making a physical necessity for most men and women or isn"t it?" Prothero demanded. "There"s a simple question enough, and is there anything whatever in your confounded wisdom of the ages to tell me yes or no? Can an ordinary celibate be as healthy and vigorous as a mated man? Is a spinster of thirty-eight a healthy human being? Can she be? I don"t believe so. Then why in thunder do we let her be? Here am I at a centre of learning and wisdom and I don"t believe so; and there is nothing in all our colleges, libraries and roomsfull of wiseacres here, to settle that plain question for me, plainly and finally. My life is a grubby torment of cravings because it isn"t settled. If s.e.xual activity IS a part of the balance of life, if it IS a necessity, well let"s set about making it accessible and harmless and have done with it. Swedish exercises. That sort of thing. If it isn"t, if it can be reduced and done without, then let us set about teaching people HOW to control themselves and reduce and get rid of this vehement pa.s.sion. But all this m.u.f.fled mystery, this pompous sneak"s way we take with it!"
"But, Billy! How can one settle these things? It"s a matter of idiosyncrasy. What is true for one man isn"t true for another. There"s infinite difference of temperaments!"
"Then why haven"t we a cla.s.sification of temperaments and a moral code for each sort? Why am I ruled by the way of life that is convenient for Rigdon the vegetarian and fits Bowler the saint like a glove? It isn"t convenient for me. It fits me like a hair-shirt. Of course there are temperaments, but why can"t we formulate them and exercise the elementary charity of recognizing that one man"s health in these matters is another man"s death? Some want love and gratification and some don"t.
There are people who want children and people who don"t want to be bothered by children but who are full of vivid desires. There are people whose only happiness is chast.i.ty, and women who would rather be courtesans than mothers. Some of us would concentrate upon a single pa.s.sion or a single idea; others overflow with a miscellaneous--tenderness. Yes,--and you smile! Why spit upon and insult a miscellaneous tenderness, Benham? Why grin at it? Why try every one by the standards that suit oneself? We"re savages, Benham, shamefaced savages, still. Shamefaced and persecuting.
"I was angry about s.e.x by seventeen," he went on. "Every year I live I grow angrier."
His voice rose to a squeal of indignation as he talked.
"Think," he said, "of the amount of thinking and feeling about s.e.x that is going on in Cambridge this morning. The hundreds out of these thousands full of it. A vast tank of cerebration. And we put none of it together; we work nothing out from that but poor little couplings and casual stories, patchings up of situations, misbehaviours, blunders, disease, trouble, escapes; and the next generation will start, and the next generation after that will start with nothing but your wisdom of the ages, which isn"t wisdom at all, which is just awe and funk, taboos and mystery and the secretive cunning of the savage....
"What I really want to do is my work," said Prothero, going off quite unexpectedly again. "That is why all this business, this incessant craving and the shame of it and all makes me so infernally angry...."
11
"There I"m with you," cried Benham, struggling out of the thick torrent of Prothero"s prepossessions. "What we want to do is our work."
He clung to his idea. He raised his voice to prevent Prothero getting the word again.
"It"s this, that you call Work, that I call--what do I call it?--living the aristocratic life, which takes all the coa.r.s.e simplicity out of this business. If it was only submission.... YOU think it is only submission--giving way.... It isn"t only submission. We"d manage s.e.x all right, we"d be the happy swine our senses would make us, if we didn"t know all the time that there was something else to live for, something far more important. And different. Absolutely different and contradictory. So different that it cuts right across all these considerations. It won"t fit in.... I don"t know what this other thing is; it"s what I want to talk about with you. But I know that it IS, in all my bones.... YOU know.... It demands control, it demands continence, it insists upon disregard."
But the ideas of continence and disregard were unpleasant ideas to Prothero that day.
"Mankind," said Benham, "is overcharged with this s.e.x. It suffocates us. It gives life only to consume it. We struggle out of the urgent necessities of a mere animal existence. We are not so much living as being married and given in marriage. All life is swamped in the love story...."
"Man is only overcharged because he is unsatisfied," said Prothero, sticking stoutly to his own view.
12
It was only as they sat at a little table in the orchard at Grantchester after their lunch that Benham could make head against Prothero and recover that largeness of outlook which had so easily touched the imagination of Amanda. And then he did not so much dispose of Prothero"s troubles as soar over them. It is the last triumph of the human understanding to sympathize with desires we do not share, and to Benham who now believed himself to be loved beyond the chances of life, who was satisfied and tranquil and austerely content, it was impossible that Prothero"s demands should seem anything more than the grotesque and squalid squealings of the beast that has to be overridden and rejected altogether. It is a freakish fact of our composition that these most intense feelings in life are just those that are most rapidly and completely forgotten; hate one may recall for years, but the magic of love and the flame of desire serve their purpose in our lives and vanish, leaving no trace, like the snows of Venice. Benham was still not a year and a half from the meretricious delights of Mrs. Skelmersdale, and he looked at Prothero as a marble angel might look at a swine in its sty....
What he had now in mind was an expedition to Russia. When at last he could sufficiently release Prothero"s attention, he unfolded the project that had been developing steadily in him since his honeymoon experience.
He had discovered a new reason for travelling. The last country we can see clearly, he had discovered, is our own country. It is as hard to see one"s own country as it is to see the back of one"s head. It is too much behind us, too much ourselves. But Russia is like England with everything larger, more vivid, cruder; one felt that directly one walked about St. Petersburg. St. Petersburg upon its Neva was like a savage untamed London on a larger Thames; they were seagull-haunted tidal cities, like no other capitals in Europe. The shipping and buildings mingled in their effects. Like London it looked over the heads of its own people to a limitless polyglot empire. And Russia was an aristocratic land, with a middle-cla.s.s that had no pride in itself as a cla.s.s; it had a British toughness and incompetence, a British disregard of logic and meticulous care. Russia, like England, was outside Catholic Christendom, it had a state church and the opposition to that church was not secularism but dissent. One could draw a score of such contrasted parallels. And now it was in a state of intolerable stress, that laid bare the elemental facts of a great social organization. It was having its South African war, its war at the other end of the earth, with a certain defeat instead of a dubious victory....
"There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in England," said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.
Benham went on with his discourse about Russia....
"At the college of Troitzka," said Prothero, "which I understand is a kind of monster Trinity unenc.u.mbered by a University, Binns tells me that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality."
Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.
He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation.
He led up to the a.s.sertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty of every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much. And so he was going, and if Prothero cared to come too--
"Yes," said Prothero, "I should like to go to Russia."