第34章 CHAPTER THE SECOND(3)

An aristocratic world-state; this political dream had already taken hold of Benham's imagination when he came to town.But it was a dream, something that had never existed, something that indeed may never materialize, and such dreams, though they are vivid enough in a study at night, fade and vanish at the rustle of a daily newspaper or the sound of a passing band.To come back again....So it was with Benham.Sometimes he was set clearly towards this world-state that Prothero had talked into possibility.Sometimes he was simply abreast of the patriotic and socially constructive British Imperialism of Breeze and Westerton.And there were moods when the two things were confused in his mind, and the glamour of world dominion rested wonderfully on the slack and straggling British Empire of Edward the Seventh--and Mr.Rudyard Kipling and Mr.

Chamberlain.He did go on for a time honestly entertaining both these projects in his mind, each at its different level, the greater impalpable one and the lesser concrete one within it.In some unimaginable way he could suppose that the one by some miracle of ennoblement--and neglecting the Frenchman, the Russian, the German, the American, the Indian, the Chinaman, and, indeed, the greater part of mankind from the problem--might become the other....

All of which is recorded here, without excess of comment, as it happened, and as, in a mood of astonished reminiscences, he came finally to perceive it, and set it down for White's meditative perusal.

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But to the enthusiasm of the young, dreams have something of the substance of reality and realities, something of the magic of dreams.The London to which Benham came from Cambridge and the disquisitions of Prothero was not the London of a mature and disillusioned vision.It was London seen magnified and distorted through the young man's crystalline intentions.It had for him a quality of multitudinous, unquenchable activity.Himself filled with an immense appetite for life, he was unable to conceive of London as fatigued.He could not suspect these statesmen he now began to meet and watch, of jaded wills and petty spites, he imagined that all the important and influential persons in this large world of affairs were as frank in their private lives and as unembarrassed in their financial relationships as his untainted self.And he had still to reckon with stupidity.He believed in the statecraft of leader-writers and the sincerity of political programmes.And so regarded, what an avenue to Empire was Whitehall! How momentous was the sunrise in St.James's Park, and how significant the clustering knot of listeners and speakers beneath the tall column that lifts our Nelson to the windy sky!

For a time Benham was in love with the idea of London.He got maps of London and books about London.He made plans to explore its various regions.He tried to grasp it all, from the conscious picturesqueness of its garden suburbs to the factories of Croydon, from the clerk-villadoms of Ealing to the inky streams of Bow.In those days there were passenger steamboats that would take one from the meadows of Hampton Court past the whole spectacle of London out to the shipping at Greenwich and the towed liners, the incessant tugs, the heaving portals of the sea....His time was far too occupied for him to carry out a tithe of these expeditions he had planned, but he had many walks that bristled with impressions.

Northward and southward, eastward and westward a dreaming young man could wander into a wilderness of population, polite or sombre, poor, rich, or middle-class, but all ceaselessly active, all urgently pressing, as it seemed, to their part in the drama of the coming years.He loved the late afternoon, when every artery is injected and gorged with the multitudinous home-going of the daily workers, he loved the time of lighting up, and the clustering excitements of the late hours.And he went out southward and eastward into gaunt regions of reeking toil.As yet he knew nothing of the realities of industrialism.He saw only the beauty of the great chimneys that rose against the sullen smoke-barred sunsets, and he felt only the romance of the lurid shuddering flares that burst out from squat stacks of brickwork and lit the emptiness of strange and slovenly streets....

And this London was only the foreground of the great scene upon which he, as a prosperous, well-befriended young Englishman, was free to play whatever part he could.This narrow turbid tidal river by which he walked ran out under the bridges eastward beneath the grey-blue clouds towards Germany, towards Russia, and towards Asia, which still seemed in those days so largely the Englishman's Asia.

And when you turned about at Blackfriars Bridge this sense of the round world was so upon you that you faced not merely Westminster, but the icy Atlantic and America, which one could yet fancy was a land of Englishmen--Englishmen a little estranged.At any rate they assimilated, they kept the tongue.The shipping in the lower reaches below the Tower there carried the flags of every country under the sky....As he went along the riverside he met a group of dusky students, Chinese or Japanese.Cambridge had abounded in Indians; and beneath that tall clock tower at Westminster it seemed as though the world might centre.The background of the Englishman's world reached indeed to either pole, it went about the earth, his background it was--for all that he was capable of doing.

All this had awaited him....

Is it any wonder if a young man with an excitable imagination came at times to the pitch of audible threats? If the extreme indulgence of his opportunity and his sense of ability and vigour lifted his vanity at moments to the kingly pitch? If he ejaculated and made a gesture or so as he went along the Embankment?

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