The Research Magnificent Part 37

The Hindu agitators at the cavernous dinner under the House of Commons came to the conclusion that Benham was a dreamer. And over against Amanda at her dinner-party sat Sir Sidney Umber, one of those men who know that their judgments are quoted.

"Who is the beautiful young woman who is seeing visions?" he asked of his neighbour in confidential undertones....

He t.i.ttered. "I think, you know, she ought to seem just SLIGHTLY aware that the man to her left is talking to her...."

9

A few days later Benham went down to Cambridge, where Prothero was now a fellow of Trinity and Brissenden Trust Lecturer....

All through Benham's writing there was manifest a persuasion that in some way Prothero was necessary to his mind. It was as if he looked to Prothero to keep him real. He suspected even while he obeyed that upward flourish which was his own essential characteristic. He had a peculiar feeling that somehow that upward bias would betray him; that from exaltation he might presently float off, into the higher, the better, and so to complete unreality. He fled from priggishness and the terror of such sublimity alike to Prothero. Moreover, in relation to so many things Prothero in a peculiar distinctive manner SAW. He had less self-control than Benham, less integrity of purpose, less concentration, and things that were before his eyes were by the very virtue of these defects invariably visible to him. Things were able to insist upon themselves with him. Benham, on the other hand, when facts contradicted his purpose too stoutly, had a way of becoming blind to them. He repudiated inconvenient facts. He mastered and made his world; Prothero accepted and recorded his. Benham was a will towards the universe where Prothero was a perception and Amanda a confusing responsive activity.

And it was because of his realization of this profound difference between them that he was possessed by the idea of taking Prothero with him about the world, as a detachable kind of vision--rather like that eye the Graiae used to hand one another....

After the busy sunlit streets of Maytime Cambridge, Prothero's rooms in Trinity, their windows full of Gothic perspectives and light-soaked blue sky, seemed cool and quiet. A flavour of scholars.h.i.+p pervaded them--a little blended with the flavour of innumerable breakfasts nearly but not completely forgotten. Prothero's door had been locked against the world, and he had appeared after a slight delay looking a little puffy and only apprehending who his visitor was after a resentful stare for the better part of a second. He might have been asleep, he might have been doing anything but the examination papers he appeared to be doing. The two men exchanged personal details; they had not met since some months before Benham' s marriage, and the visitor's eye went meanwhile from his host to the room and back to his host's face as though they were all aspects of the thing he was after, the Prothero humour, the earthly touch, the distinctive Prothero flavour. Then his eye was caught by a large red, incongruous, meretricious-looking volume upon the couch that had an air of having been flung aside, VENUS IN GEM AND MARBLE, its cover proclaimed....

His host followed that glance and blushed. "They send me all sorts of inappropriate stuff to review," he remarked.

And then he was denouncing celibacy.

The transition wasn't very clear to Benham. His mind had been preoccupied by the problem of how to open his own large project.

Meanwhile Prothero got, as it were, the conversational bit between his teeth and bolted. He began to say the most shocking things right away, so that Benham's attention was caught in spite of himself.

"Inflammatory cla.s.sics."

"What's that?"

"Celibacy, my dear Benham, is maddening me," said Prothero. "I can't stand it any longer."

It seemed to Benham that somewhere, very far away, in another world, such a statement might have been credible. Even in his own life,--it was now indeed a remote, forgotten stage--there had been something distantly akin....

"You're going to marry?"

"I must."

"Who's the lady, Billy?"

"I don't know. Venus."

His little red-brown eye met his friend's defiantly. "So far as I know, it is Venus Anadyomene." A flash of laughter pa.s.sed across his face and left it still angrier, still more indecorously defiant. "I like her best, anyhow. I do, indeed. But, Lord! I feel that almost any of them--"

"Tut, tut!" said Benham.

Prothero flushed deeply but stuck to his discourse.

"Wasn't it always your principle, Benham, to look facts in the face? I am not p.r.o.nouncing an immoral principle. Your manner suggests I am. I am telling you exactly how I feel. That is how I feel. I want--Venus.

I don't want her to talk to or anything of that sort.... I have been studying that book, yes, that large, vulgar, red book, all the morning, instead of doing any work. Would you like to see it?... NO!...

"This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad. It is a peculiarly erotic spring. I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, I cannot attend to ordinary conversation. These feelings, I understand, are by no means peculiar to myself.... No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now that the spirit of speech is upon me. When you came in you said, 'How are you?' I am telling you how I am. You brought it on yourself. Well--I am--inflamed. I have no strong moral or religious convictions to a.s.sist me either to endure or deny this--this urgency. And so why should I deny it? It's one of our chief problems here. The majority of my fellow dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and combination-room are in just the same case as myself. The fever in oneself detects the fever in others. I know their hidden thoughts. Their fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts. Each covers his miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference. A tattered cloak.... Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible vice of continence--"

"Billy, what's the matter with you?"

Prothero grimaced impatience. "Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a humbug, Benham?" he screamed, and in screaming became calmer. "Nature taunts me, maddens me. My life is becoming a h.e.l.l of shame. 'Get out from all these books,' says Nature, 'and serve the Flesh.' The Flesh, Benham. Yes--I insist--the Flesh. Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any man a pure spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage, with too much port and no Aspasia. Not that I should have liked Aspasia."

"Mutual, perhaps, Billy."

"Oh! you can sneer!"

"Well, clearly--Saint Paul is my authority--it's marriage, Billy."

Prothero had walked to the window. He turned round.

"I CAN'T marry," he said. "The trouble has gone too far. I've lost my nerve in the presence of women. I don't like them any more. They come at one--done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about all sorts of things that don't matter...." He surveyed his friend's thoughtful att.i.tude. "I'm getting to hate women, Benham. I'm beginning now to understand the bitterness of spinsters against men. I'm beginning to grasp the unkindliness of priests. The perpetual denial. To you, happily married, a woman is just a human being. You can talk to her, like her, you can even admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge against her...."

He sat down abruptly.

Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered him.

"Billy! this is delusion," he said. "What's come over you?"

"I'm telling you," said Prothero.

"No," said Benham.

Prothero awaited some further utterance.

"I'm looking for the cause of it. It's feeding, Billy. It's port and stimulants where there is no scope for action. It's idleness. I begin to see now how much fatter you are, how much coa.r.s.er."

"Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers. Look at that filing system like an a.r.s.enal of wisdom. Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow not idleness."

"There's still bodily idleness. No. That's your trouble. You're stuffy.

You've enlarged your liver. You sit in this room of a warm morning after an extravagant breakfast--. And peep and covet."

"Just eggs and bacon!"

"Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be. Come out of it, Billy, and get aired."

"How can one?"

"Easily. Come out of it now. Come for a walk, you Pig!"

"It's an infernally warm morning.

"Walk with me to Grantchester."

"We might go by boat. You could row."