第89章 CHAPTER THE FIFTH(20)

His devotion filled Benham with scorn.His determination to serve Amanda at any price, to bear the grossest humiliations and slights for her, his humility, his service and tenderness, his care for her moods and happiness, seemed to Benham a treachery to human nobility.

That rage against Easton was like the rage of a trade-unionist against a blackleg.Are all the women to fall to the men who will be their master-slaves and keepers? But it was not simply that Benham felt men must be freed from this incessant attendance; women too must free themselves from their almost instinctive demand for an attendant....

His innate disposition was to treat women as responsible beings.

Never in his life had he thought of a woman as a pretty thing to be fooled and won and competed for and fought over.So that it was Amanda he wanted to reach and reckon with now, Amanda who had mated and ruled his senses only to fling him into this intolerable pit of shame and jealous fury.But the forces that were driving him home now were the forces below the level of reason and ideas, organic forces compounded of hate and desire, profound aboriginal urgencies.

He thought, indeed, very little as he lay in his berth or sulked on deck; his mind lay waste under a pitiless invasion of exasperating images that ever and again would so wring him that his muscles would tighten and his hands clench or he would find himself restraining a snarl, the threat of the beast, in his throat.

Amanda grew upon his imagination until she overshadowed the whole world.She filled the skies.She bent over him and mocked him.

She became a mystery of passion and dark beauty.She was the sin of the world.One breathed her in the winds of the sea.She had taken to herself the greatness of elemental things....

So that when at last he saw her he was amazed to see her, and see that she was just a creature of common size and quality, a rather tired and very frightened-looking white-faced young woman, in an evening-dress of unfamiliar fashion, with little common trinkets of gold and colour about her wrists and neck.

In that instant's confrontation he forgot all that had brought him homeward.He stared at her as one stares at a stranger whom one has greeted in mistake for an intimate friend.

For he saw that she was no more the Amanda he hated and desired to kill than she had ever been the Amanda he had loved.

27

He took them by surprise.It had been his intention to take them by surprise.Such is the inelegance of the jealous state.

He reached London in the afternoon and put up at a hotel near Charing Cross.In the evening about ten he appeared at the house in Lancaster Gate.The butler was deferentially amazed.Mrs.Benham was, he said, at a theatre with Sir Philip Easton, and he thought some other people also.He did not know when she would be back.

She might go on to supper.It was not the custom for the servants to wait up for her.

Benham went into the study that reduplicated his former rooms in Finacue Street and sat down before the fire the butler lit for him.

He sent the man to bed, and fell into profound meditation.

It was nearly two o'clock when he heard the sound of her latchkey and went out at once upon the landing.

The half-door stood open and Easton's car was outside.She stood in the middle of the hall and relieved Easton of the gloves and fan he was carrying.

"Good-night," she said, "I am so tired."

"My wonderful goddess," he said.

She yielded herself to his accustomed embrace, then started, stared, and wrenched herself out of his arms.

Benham stood at the top of the stairs looking down upon them, white-faced and inexpressive.Easton dropped back a pace.For a moment no one moved nor spoke, and then very quietly Easton shut the half-door and shut out the noises of the road.

For some seconds Benham regarded them, and as he did so his spirit changed....

Everything he had thought of saying and doing vanished out of his mind.

He stuck his hands into his pockets and descended the staircase.

When he was five or six steps above them, he spoke."Just sit down here," he said, with a gesture of one hand, and sat down himself upon the stairs."DO sit down," he said with a sudden testiness as they continued standing."I know all about this affair.Do please sit down and let us talk....Everybody's gone to bed long ago.""Cheetah!" she said."Why have you come back like this?"Then at his mute gesture she sat down at his feet.

"I wish you would sit down, Easton," he said in a voice of subdued savagery.

"Why have you come back?" Sir Philip Easton found his voice to ask.

"SIT down," Benham spat, and Easton obeyed unwillingly.

"I came back," Benham went on, "to see to all this.Why else? Idon't--now I see you--feel very fierce about it.But it has distressed me.You look changed, Amanda, and fagged.And your hair is untidy.It's as if something had happened to you and made you a stranger....You two people are lovers.Very natural and simple, but I want to get out of it.Yes, I want to get out of it.

That wasn't quite my idea, but now I see it is.It's queer, but on the whole I feel sorry for you.All of us, poor humans--.There's reason to be sorry for all of us.We're full of lusts and uneasiness and resentments that we haven't the will to control.

What do you two people want me to do to you? Would you like a divorce, Amanda? It's the clean, straight thing, isn't it? Or would the scandal hurt you?"Amanda sat crouched together, with her eyes on Benham.

"Give us a divorce," said Easton, looking to her to confirm him.

Amanda shook her head.

"I don't want a divorce," she said.

"Then what do you want?" asked Benham with sudden asperity.

"I don't want a divorce," she repeated."Why do you, after a long silence, come home like this, abruptly, with no notice?""It was the way it took me," said Benham, after a little interval.

"You have left me for long months."

"Yes.I was angry.And it was ridiculous to be angry.I thought Iwanted to kill you, and now I see you I see that all I want to do is to help you out of this miserable mess--and then get away from you.