"I shall go to Odessa alone, Billy. I"ll make things all right here before I go...."
He closed the door behind him and went in a state of profound thought to his own room....
Presently Prothero came to him with a vague inopportune desire to explain what so evidently did not need explaining. He walked about the room trying ways of putting it, while Benham packed.
In an unaccountable way Prothero"s bristling little mind seemed to have shrunken to something sleek and small.
"I wish," he said, "you could stay for a later train and have lunch and meet her. She"s not the ordinary thing. She"s--different."
Benham plumbed depths of wisdom. "Billy," he said, "no woman IS the ordinary thing. They are all--different...."
14
For a time this affair of Prothero"s seemed to be a matter as disconnected from the Research Magnificent as one could imagine any matter to be. While Benham went from Moscow and returned, and travelled hither and thither, and involved himself more and more in the endless tangled threads of the revolutionary movement in Russia, Prothero was lost to all those large issues in the development of his personal situation. He contributed nothing to Benham"s thought except attempts at discouragement. He reiterated his declaration that all the vast stress and change of Russian national life was going on because it was universally disregarded. "I tell you, as I told you before, that n.o.body is attending. You think because all Moscow, all Russia, is in the picture, that everybody is concerned. n.o.body is concerned. n.o.body cares what is happening. Even the men who write in newspapers and talk at meetings about it don"t care. They are thinking of their dinners, of their clothes, of their money, of their wives. They hurry home...."
That was his excuse.
Manifestly it was an excuse.
His situation developed into remarkable complications of jealousy and divided counsels that Benham found altogether incomprehensible. To Benham in those days everything was very simple in this business of love. The aristocrat had to love ideally; that was all. He had to love Amanda. He and Amanda were now very deeply in love again, more in love, he felt, than they had ever been before. They were now writing love-letters to each other and enjoying a separation that was almost voluptuous. She found in the epistolatory treatment of her surrender to him and to the natural fate of women, a delightful exercise for her very considerable powers of expression. Life pointed now wonderfully to the great time ahead when there would be a Cheetah cub in the world, and meanwhile the Cheetah loped about the wild world upon a mighty quest. In such terms she put it. Such foolishness written in her invincibly square and youthful hand went daily from London to Russia, and stacked up against his return in the porter"s office at the Cosmopolis Bazaar or pursued him down through the jarring disorders of south-west Russia, or waited for him at ill-chosen post-offices that deflected his journeyings wastefully or in several instances went altogether astray. Perhaps they supplied self-educating young strikers in the postal service with useful exercises in the deciphering of ma.n.u.script English. He wrote back five hundred different ways of saying that he loved her extravagantly....
It seemed to Benham in those days that he had found the remedy and solution of all those s.e.xual perplexities that distressed the world; Heroic Love to its highest note--and then you go about your business. It seemed impossible not to be happy and lift one"s chin high and diffuse a bracing kindliness among the unfortunate mult.i.tudes who stewed in affliction and hate because they had failed as yet to find this simple, culminating elucidation. And Prothero--Prothero, too, was now achieving the same grand elementariness, out of his l.u.s.ts and protests and general physical squalor he had flowered into love. For a time it is true it made rather an ineffective companion of him, but this was the mere goose-stepping for the triumphal march; this way ultimately lay exaltation. Benham had had as yet but a pa.s.sing glimpse of this Anglo-Russian, who was a lady and altogether unlike her fellows; he had seen her for a doubtful second or so as she and Prothero drove past him, and his impression was of a rather little creature, white-faced with dusky hair under a red cap, paler and smaller but with something in her, a quiet alertness, that gave her a touch of kinship with Amanda. And if she liked old Prothero-- And, indeed, she must like old Prothero or could she possibly have made him so deeply in love with her?
They must stick to each other, and then, presently, Prothero"s soul would wake up and face the world again. What did it matter what she had been?
Through stray shots and red conflict, long tediums of strained anxiety and the physical dangers of a barbaric country staggering towards revolution, Benham went with his own love like a lamp within him and this affair of Prothero"s reflecting its light, and he was quite prepared for the most sympathetic and liberal behaviour when he came back to Moscow to make the lady"s acquaintance. He intended to help Prothero to marry and take her back to Cambridge, and to a.s.sist by every possible means in destroying and forgetting the official yellow ticket that defined her status in Moscow. But he reckoned without either Prothero or the young lady in this expectation.
It only got to him slowly through his political preoccupations that there were obscure obstacles to this manifest course. Prothero hesitated; the lady expressed doubts.
On closer acquaintance her resemblance to Amanda diminished. It was chiefly a similarity of complexion. She had a more delicate face than Amanda, and its youthful brightness was deadened; she had none of Amanda"s glow, and she spoke her mother"s language with a pretty halting limp that was very different from Amanda"s clear decisions.
She put her case compactly.
"I would not DO in Cambridge," she said with an infinitesimal glance at Prothero.
"Mr. Benham," she said, and her manner had the gravity of a woman of affairs, "now do you see me in Cambridge? Now do you see me? Kept outside the walls? In a little DATCHA? With no occupation? Just to amuse him."
And on another occasion when Prothero was not with her she achieved still completer lucidity.
"I would come if I thought he wanted me to come," she said. "But you see if I came he would not want me to come. Because then he would have me and so he wouldn"t want me. He would just have the trouble. And I am not sure if I should be happy in Cambridge. I am not sure I should be happy enough to make him happy. It is a very learned and intelligent and charming society, of course; but here, THINGS HAPPEN. At Cambridge nothing happens--there is only education. There is no revolution in Cambridge; there are not even sinful people to be sorry for.... And he says himself that Cambridge people are particular. He says they are liberal but very, very particular, and perhaps I could not always act my part well. Sometimes I am not always well behaved. When there is music I behave badly sometimes, or when I am bored. He says the Cambridge people are so liberal that they do not mind what you are, but he says they are so particular that they mind dreadfully how you are what you are.... So that it comes to exactly the same thing...."
"Anna Alexievna," said Benham suddenly, "are you in love with Prothero?"
Her manner became conscientiously scientific.
"He is very kind and very generous--too generous. He keeps sending for more money--hundreds of roubles, I try to prevent him."
"Were you EVER in love?"
"Of course. But it"s all gone long ago. It was like being hungry. Only very fine hungry. Exquisite hungry.... And then being disgusted...."
"He is in love with you."
"What is love?" said Anna. "He is grateful. He is by nature grateful."
She smiled a smile, like the smile of a pale Madonna who looks down on her bambino.
"And you love nothing?"
"I love Russia--and being alone, being completely alone. When I am dead perhaps I shall be alone. Not even my own body will touch me then."
Then she added, "But I shall be sorry when he goes."
Afterwards Benham talked to Prothero alone. "Your Anna," he said, "is rather wonderful. At first, I tell you now frankly I did not like her very much, I thought she looked "used," she drank vodka at lunch, she was gay, uneasily; she seemed a sham thing. All that was prejudice. She thinks; she"s generous, she"s fine."
"She"s tragic," said Prothero as though it was the same thing.
He spoke as though he noted an objection. His next remark confirmed this impression. "That"s why I can"t take her back to Cambridge," he said.
"You see, Benham," he went on, "she"s human. She"s not really feminine.
I mean, she"s--uns.e.xed. She isn"t fitted to be a wife or a mother any more. We"ve talked about the possible life in England, very plainly.
I"ve explained what a household in Cambridge would mean.... It doesn"t attract her.... In a way she"s been let out from womanhood, forced out of womanhood, and I see now that when women are let out from womanhood there"s no putting them back. I could give a lecture on Anna. I see now that if women are going to be wives and mothers and homekeepers and ladies, they must be got ready for it from the beginning, sheltered, never really let out into the wild chances of life. She has been.
Bitterly. She"s REALLY emanc.i.p.ated. And it"s let her out into a sort of nothingness. She"s no longer a woman, and she isn"t a man. She ought to be able to go on her own--like a man. But I can"t take her back to Cambridge. Even for her sake."
His perplexed eyes regarded Benham.
"You won"t be happy in Cambridge--alone," said Benham.
"Oh, d.a.m.nably not! But what can I do? I had at first some idea of coming to Moscow for good--teaching."
He paused. "Impossible. I"m worth nothing here. I couldn"t have kept her."
"Then what are you going to do, Billy?"
"I don"t KNOW what I"m going to do, I tell you. I live for the moment.
To-morrow we are going out into the country."
"I don"t understand," said Benham with a gesture of resignation. "It seems to me that if a man and woman love each other--well, they insist upon each other. What is to happen to her if you leave her in Moscow?"
"d.a.m.nation! Is there any need to ask that?"
"Take her to Cambridge, man. And if Cambridge objects, teach Cambridge better manners."
Prothero"s face was suddenly transfigured with rage.
"I tell you she won"t come!" he said.