14
Benham sat at a table in the smoking–room of the Sherborough Hotel at Johannesburg and told of these things. White watched him from an armchair. And as he listened he noted again the intensification of Benham's face, the darkness under his brows, the pallor of his skin, the touch of red in his eyes. For there was still that red gleam in Benham's eyes; it shone when he looked out of a darkness into a light. And he sat forward with his arms folded under him, or moved his long lean hand about over the things on the table.
"You see," he said, "this is a sort of horror in my mind. Things like this stick in my mind. I am always seeing Prothero now, and it will take years to get this scar off my memory again. Once before—about a horse, I had the same kind of distress. And it makes me tender, sore–minded about everything. It will go, of course, in the long run, and it's just like any other ache that lays hold of one. One can't cure it. One has to get along with it….
"I know, White, I ought to have sent that money, but how was I to know then that it was so imperative to send that money?…
"At the time it seemed just pandering to his vices….
"I was angry. I shall never subdue that kind of hastiness altogether. It takes me by surprise. Before the messenger was out of sight I had repented….
"I failed him. I have gone about in the world dreaming of tremendous things and failing most people. My wife too…."
He stopped talking for a little time and folded his arms tight and stared hard in front of himself, his lips compressed.
"You see, White," he said, with a kind of setting of the teeth, "this is the sort of thing one has to stand. Life is imperfect. Nothing can be done perfectly. And on the whole—" He spoke still more slowly, "I would go through again with the very same things that have hurt my people. If I had to live over again. I would try to do the things without hurting the people, but I would do the things anyhow. Because I'm raw with remorse, it does not follow that on the whole I am not doing right. Right doing isn't balm. If I could have contrived not to hurt these people as I have done, it would have been better, just as it would be better to win a battle without any killed or wounded. I was clumsy with them and they suffered, I suffer for their suffering, but still I have to stick to the way I have taken. One's blunders are accidents. If one thing is clearer than another it is that the world isn't accident–proof….
"But I wish I had sent those dollars to Prothero…. God! White, but I lie awake at night thinking of that messenger as he turned away…. Trying to stop him….
"I didn't send those dollars. So fifty or sixty people were killed and many wounded…. There for all practical purposes the thing ends. Perhaps it will serve to give me a little charity for some other fool's haste and blundering….
"I couldn't help it, White. I couldn't help it….
"The main thing, the impersonal thing, goes on. One thinks, one learns, one adds one's contribution of experience and understanding. The spirit of the race goes on to light and comprehension. In spite of accidents. In spite of individual blundering.
"It would be absurd anyhow to suppose that nobility is so easy as to come slick and true on every occasion….
"If one gives oneself to any long aim one must reckon with minor disasters. This Research I undertook grows and grows. I believe in it more and more. The more it asks from me the more I give to it. When I was a youngster I thought the thing I wanted was just round the corner. I fancied I would find out the noble life in a year or two, just what it was, just where it took one, and for the rest of my life I would live it. Finely. But I am just one of a multitude of men, each one going a little wrong, each one achieving a little right. And the noble life is a long, long way ahead…. We are working out a new way of living for mankind, a new rule, a new conscience. It's no small job for all of us. There must be lifetimes of building up and lifetimes of pulling down and trying again. Hope and disappointments and much need for philosophy…. I see myself now for the little workman I am upon this tremendous undertaking. And all my life hereafter goes to serve it…."
He turned his sombre eyes upon his friend. He spoke with a grim enthusiasm. "I'm a prig. I'm a fanatic, White. But I have something clear, something better worth going on with than any adventure of personal relationship could possibly be…."
And suddenly he began to tell White as plainly as he could of the faith that had grown up in his mind. He spoke with a touch of defiance, with the tense force of a man who shrinks but overcomes his shame. "I will tell you what I believe."
He told of his early dread of fear and baseness, and of the slow development, expansion and complication of his idea of self–respect until he saw that there is no honour nor pride for a man until he refers his life to ends and purposes beyond himself. An aristocrat must be loyal. So it has ever been, but a modern aristocrat must also be lucid; there it is that one has at once the demand for kingship and the repudiation of all existing states and kings. In this manner he had come to his idea of a great world republic that must replace the little warring kingdoms of the present, to the conception of an unseen kingship ruling the whole globe, to his King Invisible, who is the Lord of Truth and all sane loyalty. "There," he said, "is the link of our order, the new knighthood, the new aristocracy, that must at last rule the earth. There is our Prince. He is in me, he is in you; he is latent in all mankind. I have worked this out and tried it and lived it, and I know that outwardly and inwardly this is the way a man must live, or else be a poor thing and a base one. On great occasions and small occasions I have failed myself a thousand times, but no failure lasts if your faith lasts. What I have learnt, what I have thought out and made sure, I want now to tell the world. Somehow I will tell it, as a book I suppose, though I do not know if I shall ever be able to make a book. But I have away there in London or with me here all the masses of notes I have made in my search for the life that is worth while living…. We who are self–appointed aristocrats, who are not ashamed of kingship, must speak to one another….
"We can have no organization because organizations corrupt….
"No recognition….
"But we can speak plainly…."
(As he talked his voice was for a space drowned by the jingle and voices of mounted police riding past the hotel.)
"But on one side your aristocracy means revolution," said White. "It becomes a political conspiracy."
"Manifestly. An open conspiracy. It denies the king upon the stamps and the flag upon the wall. It is the continual proclamation of the Republic of Mankind."