Her personal, stark frankness had been her essential strength. And it was gone. I came back to find Amanda an accomplished actress, a thing of poses and calculated effects. She was a surface, a sham, a Lorelei.
Beneath that surface I could not discover anything individual at all.
Fear and a grasping quality, such as G.o.d gave us all when he gave us hands; but the individual I knew, the humorous wilful Spotless Leopard was gone. Whither, I cannot imagine. An amazing disappearance. Clean out of s.p.a.ce and time like a soul lost for ever.
"When I went to see her in the morning, she was made up for a scene, she acted an intricate part, never for a moment was she there in reality....
"I have got a remarkable persuasion that she lost herself in this way, by cheapening love, by making base love to a lover she despised....
There can be no inequality in love. Give and take must balance. One must be one"s natural self or the whole business is an indecent trick, a vile use of life! To use inferiors in love one must needs talk down to them, interpret oneself in their insufficient phrases, pretend, sentimentalize. And it is clear that unless oneself is to be lost, one must be content to leave alone all those people that one can reach only by sentimentalizing. But Amanda--and yet somehow I love her for it still--could not leave any one alone. So she was always feverishly weaving nets of false relationship. Until her very self was forgotten.
So she will go on until the end. With Easton it had been necessary for her to key herself to a simple exalted romanticism that was entirely insincere. She had so accustomed herself to these poses that her innate gestures were forgotten. She could not recover them; she could not even reinvent them. Between us there were momentary gleams as though presently we should be our frank former selves again. They were never more than momentary...."
And that was all that this astonishing man had seen fit to tell of his last parting from his wife.
Perhaps he did Amanda injustice. Perhaps there was a stronger thread of reality in her desire to recover him than he supposed. Clearly he believed that under the circ.u.mstances Amanda would have tried to recover anybody.
She had dressed for that morning"s encounter in a very becoming and intimate wrap of soft mauve and white silk, and she had washed and dried her dark hair so that it was a vapour about her face. She set herself with a single mind to persuade herself and Benham that they were inseparable lovers, and she would not be deflected by his grim determination to discuss the conditions of their separation. When he asked her whether she wanted a divorce, she offered to throw over Sir Philip and banish him for ever as lightly as a great lady might sacrifice an objectionable poodle to her connubial peace.
Benham pa.s.sed through perplexing phases, so that she herself began to feel that her practice with Easton had spoilt her hands. His initial grimness she could understand, and partially its breakdown into irritability. But she was puzzled by his laughter. For he laughed abruptly.
"You know, Amanda, I came home in a mood of tremendous tragedy. And really,--you are a Lark."
And then overriding her altogether, he told her what he meant to do about their future and the future of their little son.
"You don"t want a divorce and a fuss. Then I"ll leave things. I perceive I"ve no intention of marrying any more. But you"d better do the straight thing. People forget and forgive. Especially when there is no one about making a fuss against you.
"Perhaps, after all, there is something to be said for shirking it.
We"ll both be able to get at the boy then. You"ll not hurt him, and I shall want to see him. It"s better for the boy anyhow not to have a divorce.
"I"ll not stand in your way. I"ll get a little flat and I shan"t come too much to London, and when I do, you can get out of town. You must be discreet about Easton, and if people say anything about him, send them to me. After all, this is our private affair.
"We"ll go on about money matters as we have been going. I trust to you not to run me into overwhelming debts. And, of course, if at any time, you do want to marry--on account of children or anything--if n.o.body knows of this conversation we can be divorced then...."
Benham threw out these decisions in little dry sentences while Amanda gathered her forces for her last appeal.
It was an unsuccessful appeal, and at the end she flung herself down before him and clung to his knees. He struggled ridiculously to get himself clear, and when at last he succeeded she dropped prostrate on the floor with her dishevelled hair about her.
She heard the door close behind him, and still she lay there, a dark Guinevere, until with a start she heard a step upon the thick carpet without. He had come back. The door reopened. There was a slight pause, and then she raised her face and met the blank stare of the second housemaid. There are moments, suspended fragments of time rather than links in its succession, when the human eye is more intelligible than any words.
The housemaid made a rapid apologetic noise and vanished with a click of the door.
"d.a.m.n!" said Amanda.
Then slowly she rose to her knees.
She meditated through vast moments.
"It"s a cursed thing to be a woman," said Amanda. She stood up. She put her hand on the telephone in the corner and then she forgot about it.
After another long interval of thought she spoke.
"Cheetah!" she said, "Old Cheetah!...
"I didn"t THINK it of you...."
Then presently with the even joyless movements of one who does a reasonable business, with something indeed of the manner of one who packs a trunk, she rang up Sir Philip Easton.
30
The head chambermaid on the first floor of the Westwood Hotel in Danebury Street had a curious and perplexing glimpse of Benham"s private processes the morning after this affair.
Benham had taken Room 27 on the afternoon of his return to London. She had seen him twice or three times, and he had struck her as a coldly decorous person, tall, white-faced, slow speaking; the last man to behave violently or surprise a head chambermaid in any way. On the morning of his departure she was told by the first-floor waiter that the occupant of Room 26 had complained of an uproar in the night, and almost immediately she was summoned to see Benham.
He was standing facing the door and in a position which did a little obscure the condition of the room behind him. He was carefully dressed, and his manner was more cold and decorous than ever. But one of his hands was tied up in a white bandage.
"I am going this morning," he said, "I am going down now to breakfast. I have had a few little accidents with some of the things in the room and I have cut my hand. I want you to tell the manager and see that they are properly charged for on the bill.... Thank you."
The head chambermaid was left to consider the accidents.
Benham"s things were all packed up and the room had an air of having been straightened up neatly and methodically after a destructive cataclysm. One or two items that the chambermaid might possibly have overlooked in the normal course of things were carefully exhibited. For example, the sheet had been torn into half a dozen strips and they were lying side by side on the bed. The clock on the mantelpiece had been knocked into the fireplace and then pounded to pieces. All the looking-gla.s.ses in the room were smashed, apparently the electric lamp that stood on the night table by the bedside had been wrenched off and flung or hammered about amidst the other breakables. And there was a considerable amount of blood splashed about the room. The head chambermaid felt unequal to the perplexities of the spectacle and summoned her most convenient friend, the head chambermaid on the third floor, to her aid. The first-floor waiter joined their deliberations and several housemaids displayed a respectful interest in the matter.
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 rea.s.suringly 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 pa.s.sing 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 cla.s.ses 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.