第106章 CHAPTER THE SIXTH(14)

Even now I am drifting further into lies and the last shreds of dignity drop from me; a dirty, lost, and shameful leopard I am now, who was once clean and bright....You could come back, Cheetah, and you could save me yet.If you would love me...."In certain moods she could wring his heart by such imagined speeches, the very quality of her voice was in them, a softness that his ear had loved, and not only could she distress him, but when Benham was in this heartache mood, when once she had set him going, then his little mother also would rise against him, touchingly indignant, with her blue eyes bright with tears; and his frowsty father would back towards him and sit down complaining that he was neglected, and even little Mrs.Skelmersdale would reappear, bravely tearful on her chair looking after him as he slunk away from her through Kensington Gardens; indeed every personal link he had ever had to life could in certain moods pull him back through the door of self-reproach Amanda opened and set him aching and accusing himself of harshness and self-concentration.The very kittens of his childhood revived forgotten moments of long-repented hardness.For a year before Prothero was killed there were these heartaches.That tragedy gave them their crowning justification.All these people said in this form or that, "You owed a debt to us, you evaded it, you betrayed us, you owed us life out of yourself, love and services, and you have gone off from us all with this life that was ours, to live by yourself in dreams about the rule of the world, and with empty phantoms of power and destiny.All this was intellectualization.You sacrificed us to the thin things of the mind.There is no rule of the world at all, or none that a man like you may lay hold upon.The rule of the world is a fortuitous result of incalculably multitudinous forces.But all of us you could have made happier.You could have spared us distresses.Prothero died because of you.Presently it will be the turn of your father, your mother--Amanda perhaps...."He made no written note of his heartaches, but he made several memoranda about priggishness that White read and came near to understanding.In spite of the tugging at his heart-strings, Benham was making up his mind to be a prig.He weighed the cold uningratiating virtues of priggishness against his smouldering passion for Amanda, and against his obstinate sympathy for Prothero's grossness and his mother's personal pride, and he made his choice.But it was a reluctant choice.

One fragment began in the air."Of course I had made myself responsible for her life.But it was, you see, such a confoundedly energetic life, as vigorous and as slippery as an eel....Only by giving all my strength to her could I have held Amanda....So what was the good of trying to hold Amanda?...

"All one's people have this sort of claim upon one.Claims made by their pride and their self-respect, and their weaknesses and dependences.You've no right to hurt them, to kick about and demand freedom when it means snapping and tearing the silly suffering tendrils they have wrapped about you.The true aristocrat I think will have enough grasp, enough steadiness, to be kind and right to every human being and still do the work that ought to be his essential life.I see that now.It's one of the things this last year or so of loneliness has made me realize; that in so far as Ihave set out to live the aristocratic life I have failed.Instead I've discovered it--and found myself out.I'm an overstrung man.Igo harshly and continuously for one idea.I live as I ride.Iblunder through my fences, I take off too soon.I've no natural ease of mind or conduct or body.I am straining to keep hold of a thing too big for me and do a thing beyond my ability.Only after Prothero's death was it possible for me to realize the prig I have always been, first as regards him and then as regards Amanda and my mother and every one.A necessary unavoidable priggishness...."Ido not see how certain things can be done without prigs, people, that is to say, so concentrated and specialized in interest as to be a trifle inhuman, so resolved as to be rather rhetorical and forced....All things must begin with clumsiness, there is no assurance about pioneers....

"Some one has to talk about aristocracy, some one has to explain aristocracy....But the very essence of aristocracy, as Iconceive it, is that it does not explain nor talk about itself....

"After all it doesn't matter what I am....It's just a private vexation that I haven't got where I meant to get.That does not affect the truth I have to tell....

"If one has to speak the truth with the voice of a prig, still one must speak the truth.I have worked out some very considerable things in my research, and the time has come when I must set them out clearly and plainly.That is my job anyhow.My journey to London to release Amanda will be just the end of my adolescence and the beginning of my real life.It will release me from my last entanglement with the fellow creatures I have always failed to make happy....It's a detail in the work....And I shall go on.

But I shall feel very like a man who goes back for a surgical operation.

"It's very like that.A surgical operation, and when it is over perhaps I shall think no more about it.

"And beyond these things there are great masses of work to be done.

So far I have but cleared up for myself a project and outline of living.I must begin upon these masses now, I must do what I can upon the details, and, presently, I shall see more clearly where other men are working to the same ends...."12

Benham's expedition to China with Prothero was essentially a wrestle between his high resolve to work out his conception of the noble life to the utmost limit and his curiously invincible affection and sympathy for the earthliness of that inglorious little don.