第59章 CHAPTER THE FOURTH(4)

Nevertheless Benham was for some time under a vague impression that in a sort of way still he was going round the world and working out his destinies.

It was part of the fascination of Amanda that she was never what he had supposed her to be, and that nothing that he set out to do with her ever turned out as they had planned it.Her appreciations marched before her achievement, and when it came to climbing it seemed foolish to toil to summits over which her spirit had flitted days before.Their Swiss expeditions which she had foreseen as glorious wanderings amidst the blue ice of crevasses and nights of exalted hardihood became a walking tour of fitful vigour and abundant fun and delight.They spent a long day on the ice of the Aletsch glacier, but they reached the inn on its eastward side with magnificent appetites a little late for dinner.

Amanda had revealed an unexpected gift for nicknames and pretty fancies.She named herself the Leopard, the spotless Leopard; in some obscure way she intimated that the colour was black, but that was never to be admitted openly, there was supposed to be some lurking traces of a rusty brown but the word was spotless and the implication white, a dazzling white, she would play a thousand variations on the theme; in moments of despondency she was only a black cat, a common lean black cat, and sacks and half-bricks almost too good for her.But Benham was always a Cheetah.That had come to her as a revelation from heaven.But so clearly he was a Cheetah.He was a Hunting Leopard; the only beast that has an up-cast face and dreams and looks at you with absent-minded eyes like a man.She laced their journeys with a fantastic monologue telling in the third person what the Leopard and the Cheetah were thinking and seeing and doing.And so they walked up mountains and over passes and swam in the warm clear water of romantic lakes and loved each other mightily always, in chestnut woods and olive orchards and flower-starred alps and pine forests and awning-covered boats, and by sunset and moonlight and starshine; and out of these agreeable solitudes they came brown and dusty, striding side by side into sunlit entertaining fruit-piled market-places and envious hotels.

For days and weeks together it did not seem to Benham that there was anything that mattered in life but Amanda and the elemental joys of living.And then the Research Magnificent began to stir in him again.He perceived that Italy was not India, that the clue to the questions he must answer lay in the crowded new towns that they avoided, in the packed bookshops and the talk of men, and not in the picturesque and flowery solitudes to which their lovemaking carried them.

Moods began in which he seemed to forget Amanda altogether.

This happened first in the Certosa di Pavia whither they had gone one afternoon from Milan.That was quite soon after they were married.They had a bumping journey thither in a motor-car, a little doubtful if the excursion was worth while, and they found a great amazement in the lavish beauty and decorative wealth of that vast church and its associated cloisters, set far away from any population as it seemed in a flat wilderness of reedy ditches and patchy cultivation.The distilleries and outbuildings were deserted--their white walls were covered by one monstrously great and old wisteria in flower--the soaring marvellous church was in possession of a knot of unattractive guides.One of these conducted them through the painted treasures of the gold and marble chapels;he was an elderly but animated person who evidently found Amanda more wonderful than any church.He poured out great accumulations of information and compliments before her.Benham dropped behind, went astray and was presently recovered dreaming in the great cloister.The guide showed them over two of the cells that opened thereupon, each a delightful house for a solitary, bookish and clean, and each with a little secret walled garden of its own.He was covertly tipped against all regulations and departed regretfulry with a beaming dismissal from Amanda.She found Benham wondering why the Carthusians had failed to produce anything better in the world than a liqueur."One might have imagined that men would have done something in this beautiful quiet; that there would have come thought from here or will from here.""In these dear little nests they ought to have put lovers," said Amanda.

"Oh, of course, YOU would have made the place Thelema...."But as they went shaking and bumping back along the evil road to Milan, he fell into a deep musing.Suddenly he said, "Work has to be done.Because this order or that has failed, there is no reason why we should fail.And look at those ragged children in the road ahead of us, and those dirty women sitting in the doorways, and the foul ugliness of these gaunt nameless towns through which we go!

They are what they are, because we are what we are--idlers, excursionists.In a world we ought to rule....