第88章 CHAPTER THE FIFTH(19)

"There are no such women." He had written this in and struck it out, and then at some later time written it in again.There it stayed now as his last persuasion, but it set White thinking and doubting.And, indeed, there was another sheet of pencilled broken stuff that seemed to glance at quite another type of womanhood.

23

"It is clear that the women aristocrats who must come to the remaking of the world will do so in spite of limitations at least as great as those from which the aristocratic spirit of man escapes.

These women must become aristocratic through their own innate impulse, they must be self-called to their lives, exactly as men must be; there is no making an aristocrat without a predisposition for rule and nobility.And they have to discover and struggle against just exactly the limitations that we have to struggle against.They have to conquer not only fear but indulgence, indulgence of a softer, more insidious quality, and jealousy--proprietorship....

"It is as natural to want a mate as to want bread, and a thousand times in my work and in my wanderings I have thought of a mate and desired a mate.A mate--not a possession.It is a need almost naively simple.If only one could have a woman who thought of one and with one! Though she were on the other side of the world and busied about a thousand things....

"‘WITH one,' I see it must be rather than ‘OF one.' That ‘of one'

is just the unexpurgated egotistical demand coming back again....

"Man is a mating creature.It is not good to be alone.But mating means a mate....

"We should be lovers, of course; that goes without saying....

"And yet not specialized lovers, not devoted, ATTENDING lovers.

‘Dancing attendance'--as they used to say.We should meet upon our ways as the great carnivores do....

"That at any rate was a sound idea.Though we only played with it.

"But that mate desire is just a longing that can have no possible satisfaction now for me.What is the good of dreaming? Life and chance have played a trick upon my body and soul.I am mated, though I am mated to a phantom.I loved and I love Arnanda, not Easton's Amanda, but Amanda in armour, the Amanda of my dreams.

Sense, and particularly the sense of beauty, lies deeper than reason in us.There can be no mate for me now unless she comes with Amanda's voice and Amanda's face and Amanda's quick movements and her clever hands...."24

"Why am I so ungrateful to her still for all the happiness she gave me?

"There were things between us two as lovers,--love, things more beautiful than anything else in the world, things that set the mind hunting among ineffectual images in a search for impossible expression, images of sunlight shining through blood-red petals, images of moonlight in a scented garden, of marble gleaming in the shade, of far-off wonderful music heard at dusk in a great stillness, of fairies dancing softly, of floating happiness and stirring delights, of joys as keen and sudden as the knife of an assassin, assassin's knives made out of tears, tears that are happiness, wordless things; and surprises, expectations, gratitudes, sudden moments of contemplation, the sight of a soft eyelid closed in sleep, shadowy tones in the sound of a voice heard unexpectedly;sweet, dear magical things that I can find no words for....

"If she was a goddess to me, should it be any affair of mine that she was not a goddess to herself; that she could hold all this that has been between us more cheaply than I did? It does not change one jot of it for me.At the time she did not hold it cheaply.She forgets where I do not forget...."25

Such were the things that Benham could think and set down.

Yet for whole days he was possessed by the thought of killing Amanda and himself.

He did not at once turn homeward.It was in Ceylon that he dropped his work and came home.At Colombo he found a heap of letters awaiting him, and there were two of these that had started at the same time.They had been posted in London on one eventful afternoon.Lady Marayne and Amanda had quarrelled violently.Two earnest, flushed, quick-breathing women, full of neat but belated repartee, separated to write their simultaneous letters.Each letter trailed the atmosphere of that truncated encounter.Lady Marayne told her story ruthlessly.Amanda, on the other hand, generalized, and explained.Sir Philip's adoration of her was a love-friendship, it was beautiful, it was pure.Was there no trust nor courage in the world? She would defy all jealous scandal.She would not even banish him from her side.Surely the Cheetah could trust her.But the pitiless facts of Lady Marayne went beyond Amanda's explaining.The little lady's dignity had been stricken.

"I have been used as a cloak," she wrote.

Her phrases were vivid.She quoted the very words of Amanda, words she had overheard at Chexington in the twilight.They were no invention.They were the very essence of Amanda, the lover.It was as sure as if Benham had heard the sound of her voice, as if he had peeped and seen, as if she had crept by him, stooping and rustling softly.It brought back the living sense of her, excited, flushed, reckless; his wild-haired Amanda of infinite delight....All day those words of hers pursued him.All night they flared across the black universe.He buried his face in the pillows and they whispered softly in his ear.

He walked his room in the darkness longing to smash and tear.

He went out from the house and shook his ineffectual fists at the stirring quiet of the stars.

He sent no notice of his coming back.Nor did he come back with a definite plan.But he wanted to get at Amanda.

26

It was with Amanda he had to reckon.Towards Easton he felt scarcely any anger at all.Easton he felt only existed for him because Amanda willed to have it so.

Such anger as Easton did arouse in him was a contemptuous anger.