第36章 CHAPTER THE SECOND(5)

The natural development of his position under the influence of Lady Marayne had enormously enlarged the circle of his acquaintances.He had taken part in all sorts of social occasions, and sat and listened to a representative selection of political and literary and social personages, he had been several times to the opera and to a great number and variety of plays, he had been attentively inconspicuous in several really good week-end parties.He had spent a golden October in North Italy with his mother, and escaped from the glowing lassitude of Venice for some days of climbing in the Eastern Alps.In January, in an outbreak of enquiry, he had gone with Lionel Maxim to St.Petersburg and had eaten zakuska, brightened his eyes with vodka, talked with a number of charming people of the war that was then imminent, listened to gipsy singers until dawn, careered in sledges about the most silent and stately of capitals, and returned with Lionel, discoursing upon autocracy and assassination, Japan, the Russian destiny, and the government of Peter the Great.That excursion was the most after his heart of all the dispersed employments of his first year.Through the rest of the winter he kept himself very fit, and still further qualified that nervous dislike for the horse that he had acquired from Prothero by hunting once a week in Essex.He was incurably a bad horseman; he rode without sympathy, he was unready and convulsive at hedges and ditches, and he judged distances badly.His white face and rigid seat and a certain joylessness of bearing in the saddle earned him the singular nickname, which never reached his ears, of the "Galvanized Corpse." He got through, however, at the cost of four quite trifling spills and without damaging either of the horses he rode.And his physical self-respect increased.

On his writing-desk appeared a few sheets of manuscript that increased only very slowly.He was trying to express his Cambridge view of aristocracy in terms of Finacue Street, West.

The artistic and intellectual movements of London had made their various demands upon his time and energies.Art came to him with a noble assumption of his interest and an intention that presently became unpleasantly obvious to sell him pictures that he did not want to buy and explain away pictures that he did.He bought one or two modern achievements, and began to doubt if art and aristocracy had any necessary connection.At first he had accepted the assumption that they had.After all, he reflected, one lives rather for life and things than for pictures of life and things or pictures arising out of life and things.This Art had an air of saying something, but when one came to grips with it what had it to say?

Unless it was Yah! The drama, and more particularly the intellectual drama, challenged his attention.In the hands of Shaw, Barker, Masefield, Galsworthy, and Hankin, it, too, had an air of saying something, but he found it extremely difficult to join on to his own demands upon life anything whatever that the intellectual drama had the air of having said.He would sit forward in the front row of the dress-circle with his cheek on his hand and his brow slightly knit.His intentness amused observant people.The drama that did not profess to be intellectual he went to with Lady Marayne, and usually on first nights.Lady Marayne loved a big first night at St.James's Theatre or His Majesty's.Afterwards, perhaps, Sir Godfrey would join them at a supper party, and all sorts of clever and amusing people would be there saying keen intimate things about each other.He met Yeats, who told amusing stories about George Moore, and afterwards he met George Moore, who told amusing stories about Yeats, and it was all, he felt, great fun for the people who were in it.But he was not in it, and he had no very keen desire to be in it.It wasn't his stuff.He had, though they were nowadays rather at the back of his mind, quite other intentions.In the meanwhile all these things took up his time and distracted his attention.

There was, as yet, no practicable aviation to beguile a young man of spirit, but there were times when Benham found himself wondering whether there might not be something rather creditable in the possession and control of a motor-car of exceptional power.Only one might smash people up.Should an aristocrat be deterred by the fear of smashing people up? If it is a selfish fear of smashing people up, if it is nerves rather than pity? At any rate it did not come to the car.

6

Among other things that delayed Benham very greatly in the development of his aristocratic experiments was the advice that was coming to him from every quarter.It came in extraordinary variety and volume, but always it had one unvarying feature.It ignored and tacitly contradicted his private intentions.

We are all of us disposed to be propagandists of our way of living, and the spectacle of a wealthy young man quite at large is enough to excite the most temperate of us without distinction of age or sex.

"If I were you," came to be a familiar phrase in his ear.This was particularly the case with political people; and they did it not only from the natural infirmity of humanity, but because, when they seemed reluctant or satisfied with him as he was, Lady Marayne egged them on.

There was a general assumption that he was to go into Parliament, and most of his counsellors assumed further that on the whole his natural sympathies would take him into the Conservative party.But it was pointed out to him that just at present the Liberal party was the party of a young man's opportunity; sooner or later the swing of the pendulum which would weed the Conservatives and proliferate Liberals was bound to come, there was always more demand and opportunity for candidates on the Liberal side, the Tariff Reformers were straining their ministerial majority to the splitting point, and most of the old Liberal leaders had died off during the years of exile.The party was no longer dominated; it would tolerate ideas.