第47章 CHAPTER THE THIRD(3)

"If you are free, if you are independent, then don't you owe something to the workers?" Betty went on, getting graver and redder with each word.

"It's just because of that," said Benham, "that I am going round the world."3

He was as free with these odd people as if he had been talking to Prothero.They were--alert.And he had been alone and silent and full of thinking for two clear days.He tried to explain why he found Socialism at once obvious and inadequate....

Presently the supper things got themselves put away and the talk moved into a smaller room with several armchairs and a fire.Mrs.

Wilder and the cousins and Amanda each smoked a cigarette as if it were symbolical, and they were joined by a grave grey-bearded man with a hyphenated name and slightly Socratic manner, dressed in a very blue linen shirt and collar, a very woolly mustard-coloured suit and loose tie, and manifestly devoted to one of those branches of exemplary domestic decoration that grow upon Socialist soil in England.He joined Betty in the opinion that the duty of a free and wealthy young man was to remain in England and give himself to democratic Socialism and the abolition of "profiteering." "Consider that chair," he said.But Benham had little feeling for the craftsmanship of chairs.

Under cross-examination Mr.Rathbone-Sanders became entangled and prophetic.It was evident he had never thought out his "democratic," he had rested in some vague tangle of idealism from which Benham now set himself with the zeal of a specialist to rout him.Such an argument sprang up as one meets with rarely beyond the happy undergraduate's range.Everybody lived in the discussion, even Amanda's mother listened visibly.Betty said she herself was certainly democratic and Mrs.Wilder had always thought herself to be so, and outside the circle round the fire Amanda hovered impatiently, not quite sure of her side as yet, but eager to come down with emphasis at the first flash of intimation.

She came down vehemently on Benham's.

And being a very clear-cutting personality with an instinct for the material rendering of things, she also came and sat beside him on by the lamp and read the REPUBLIC very intently and very thoughtfully, occasionally turning over a page.

5

When Benham got back to London he experienced an unwonted desire to perform his social obligations to the utmost.

So soon as he had had some dinner at his club he wrote his South Harting friends a most agreeable letter of thanks for their kindness to him.In a little while he hoped he should see them again.His mother, too, was most desirous to meet them....That done, he went on to his flat and to various aspects of life for which he was quite unprepared.

But here we may note that Amanda answered him.Her reply came some four days later.It was written in a square schoolgirl hand, it covered three sheets of notepaper, and it was a very intelligent essay upon the REPUBLIC of Plato."Of course," she wrote, "the Guardians are inhumanthe little square-cornered sofa.

"Of course, Mr.Rathbone-Sanders," she said, "of course the world must belong to the people who dare.Of course people aren't all alike, and dull people, as Mr.Benham says, and spiteful people, and narrow people have no right to any voice at all in things....

4

In saying this she did but echo Benham's very words, and all she said and did that evening was in quick response to Benham's earnest expression of his views.She found Benham a delightful novelty.

She liked to argue because there was no other talk so lively, and she had perhaps a lurking intellectual grudge against Mr.Rathbone-Sanders that made her welcome an ally.Everything from her that night that even verges upon the notable has been told, and yet it sufficed, together with something in the clear, long line of her limbs, in her voice, in her general physical quality, to convince Benham that she was the freest, finest, bravest spirit that he had ever encountered.

In the papers he left behind him was to be found his perplexed endeavours to explain this mental leap, that after all his efforts still remained unexplained.He had been vividly impressed by the decision and courage of her treatment of the dogs; it was just the sort of thing he could not do.And there was a certain contagiousness in the petting admiration with which her family treated her.But she was young and healthy and so was he, and in a second mystery lies the key of the first.He had fallen in love with her, and that being so whatever he needed that instantly she was.He needed a companion, clean and brave and understanding....

In his bed in the Ship that night he thought of nothing but her before he went to sleep, and when next morning he walked on his way over the South Downs to Chichester his mind was full of her image and of a hundred pleasant things about her.In his confessions he wrote, "I felt there was a sword in her spirit.I felt she was as clean as the wind."Love is the most chastening of powers, and he did not even remember now that two days before he had told the wind and the twilight that he would certainly "roll and rollick in women" unless there was work for him to do.She had a peculiarly swift and easy stride that went with him in his thoughts along the turf by the wayside halfway and more to Chichester.He thought always of the two of them as being side by side.His imagination became childishly romantic.The open down about him with its scrub of thorn and yew became the wilderness of the world, and through it they went--in armour, weightless armour--and they wore long swords.There was a breeze blowing and larks were singing and something, something dark and tortuous dashed suddenly in headlong flight from before their feet.It was an ethical problem such as those Mrs.Skelmersdale nursed in her bosom.

But at the sight of Amanda it had straightened out--and fled....