第81章 CHAPTER THE FIFTH(12)
Now you've opened the matter we may as well go into it.You were good enough to bring me here....There was a sort of understanding we were working together....We aren't....The long and short of it is, Benham, I want to pay you for my journey here and go on my own--independently."His eye and voice achieved a fierceness that Benham found nearly incredible in him.
Something that had got itself overlooked in the press of other matters jerked back into Benham's memory.It popped back so suddenly that for an instant he wanted to laugh.He turned towards the window, picked his way among Prothero's carelessly dropped garments, and stood for a moment staring into the square, with its drifting, assembling and dispersing fleet of trains and its long line of blue-coated IZVOSHTCHIKS.Then he turned.
"Billy," he said, "didn't I see you the other evening driving towards the Hermitage?""Yes," said Prothero, and added, "that's it.""You were with a lady."
"And she IS a lady," said Prothero, so deeply moved that his face twitched as though he was going to weep.
"She's a Russian?"
"She had an English mother.Oh, you needn't stand there and look so damned ironical! She's--she's a woman.She's a thing of kindness...."He was too full to go on.
"Billy, old boy," said Benham, distressed, "I don't want to be ironical--"Prothero had got his voice again.
"You'd better know," he said, "you'd better know.She's one of those women who live in this hotel.""Live in this hotel!"
"On the fourth floor.Didn't you know? It's the way in most of these big Russian hotels.They come down and sit about after lunch and dinner.A woman with a yellow ticket.Oh! I don't care.Idon't care a rap.She's been kind to me; she's--she's dear to me.
How are you to understand? I shall stop in Moscow.I shall take her to England.I can't live without her, Benham.And then-- And then you come worrying me to come to your damned Odessa!"And suddenly this extraordinary young man put his hands to his face as though he feared to lose it and would hold it on, and after an apoplectic moment burst noisily into tears.They ran between his fingers."Get out of my room," he shouted, suffocatingly."What business have you to come prying on me?"Benham sat down on a chair in the middle of the room and stared round-eyed at his friend.His hands were in his pockets.For a time he said nothing.
"Billy," he began at last, and stopped again."Billy, in this country somehow one wants to talk like a Russian.Billy, my dear--I'm not your father, I'm not your judge.I'm--unreasonably fond of you.It's not my business to settle what is right or wrong for you.
If you want to stay in Moscow, stay in Moscow.Stay here, and stay as my guest...."He stopped and remained staring at his friend for a little space.
"I didn't know," said Prothero brokenly; "I didn't know it was possible to get so fond of a person...."Benham stood up.He had never found Prothero so attractive and so abominable in his life before.
"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 Itold you before, that nobody is attending.You think because all Moscow, all Russia, is in the picture, that everybody is concerned.
Nobody is concerned.Nobody 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.