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 pa.s.sions 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 I could 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. I thought we might still make the best of a bad job. And then--. I might 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 have been right enough.
Pip was as good as gold until she undermined him.... A woman can"t wait about like an umbrella in a stand.... He was just a boy.... Only of course there she was--a novelty. It is perfectly easy to understand. She flattered him.... Men are such fools."
"Still--it"s no good saying that now."
"But she"ll spend all your money, Poff! She"ll break your back with debts. What"s to prevent her? With him living on her! For that"s what it comes to practically."
"Well, what am I to do?"
"You aren"t going back without tying her up, Poff? You ought to stop every farthing of her money--every farthing. It"s your duty."
"I can"t do things like that."
"But have you no Shame? To let that sort of thing go on!"
"If I don"t feel the Shame of it-- And I don"t."
"And that money--. I got you that money, Poff! It was my money."
Benham stared at her perplexed. "What am I to do?" he asked.
"Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay her through a solicitor.
Say that if she sees him ONCE again--"
He reflected. "No," he said at last.
"Poff!" she cried, "every time I see you, you are more and more like your father. You"re going off--just as he did. That baffled, MULISH look--priggish--solemn! Oh! it"s strange the stuff a poor woman has to bring into the world. But you"ll do nothing. I know you"ll do nothing.
You"ll stand everything. You--you Cuckold! And she"ll drive by me, she"ll pa.s.s me in theatres with the money that ought to have been mine!
Oh! Oh!"
She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other. But she went on talking. Faster and faster, less and less coherently; more and more wildly abusive. Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham sighed profoundly....
It brought the scene to a painful end....
For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.
He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her--he could never define what he owed her.
And yet, what on earth was one to do?
And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred goodwill. He went down to see him before he returned to India. But if there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr. Benham senior, it had been very carefully boarded over. The parental mind and attention were entirely engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLD about the heuristic method. Somebody had been disrespectful to Martindale House and the thing was rankling almost unendurably. It seemed to be a relief to him to show his son very fully the essentially illogical position of his a.s.sailant. He was entirely inattentive to Benham"s carefully made conversational opportunities. He would be silent at times while Benham talked and then he would break out suddenly with: "What seems to me so unreasonable, so ridiculous, in the whole of that fellow"s second argument--if one can call it an argument--.... A man who reasons as he does is bound to get laughed at. If people will only see it...."
CHAPTER THE SIXTH ~~ 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 during 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 treatment of her and that his relations to her squared with any of his preconceptions of n.o.bility, and yet at no precise point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ign.o.ble step. Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life. Like all of us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life in a certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an entirely different and unexpected way.... He had been ready for n.o.ble deeds and villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the dominant fact of his personal life was a perplexing riddle. He could not hate and condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of exoneration; he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without immediate shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he could not banish her from his mind.
During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing accepted. Meanwhile he worked. His nervous irritability increased, but it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.
Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put together under his headings of the first three "Limitations." He had resolved to emanc.i.p.ate himself from fear, indulgence, and that instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded. Amanda. Amanda. Amanda.
He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown that beating in his brain.
Emanc.i.p.ation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere prelude to the real work of a man"s life, which was to serve this dream of a larger human purpose. The bulk of his work was to discover and define that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and comprehending form of all the activities of the n.o.ble life. One cannot be n.o.ble, he had come to perceive, at large; one must be n.o.ble to an end. To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing more comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous and coherent than it is to-day seemed to him the fundamental intention of all n.o.bility. He believed more and more firmly that the impulses to make and help and subserve great purposes are abundantly present in the world, that they are inhibited by hasty thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and that the real enn.o.blement of human life was not so much a creation as a release. He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men dispersed, unhappy, and ign.o.ble under the heading of Prejudice, and he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult limitation. In one place he had written it, "Prejudice or Divisions."
That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in the measure of its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great age, the n.o.ble age, would begin.
So he set himself to examine his own mind and the mind of the world about him for prejudice, for hampering follies, disguised disloyalties and mischievous distrusts, and the great bulk of the papers that White struggled with at Westhaven Street were devoted to various aspects of this search for "Prejudice." It seemed to White to be at once the most magnificent and the most preposterous of enterprises. It was indeed no less than an enquiry into all the preventable sources of human failure and disorder.... And it was all too manifest to White also that the last place in which Benham was capable of detecting a prejudice was at the back of his own head.
Under this Fourth Limitation he put the most remarkable array of influences, race-hatred, national suspicion, the evil side of patriotism, religious and social intolerance, every social consequence of muddle headedness, every dividing force indeed except the purely personal dissensions between man and man. And he developed a metaphysical interpretation of these troubles. "No doubt," he wrote in one place, "much of the 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 ign.o.ble as dirty conduct.... Infinitely more disastrous."