第63章 CHAPTER THE FOURTH(8)

But also beside the inimical aspects which could set such doubts afoot there were in her infinite variety yet other Amandas neither very dear nor very annoying, but for the most part delightful, who entertained him as strangers might, Amandas with an odd twist which made them amusing to watch, jolly Amandas who were simply irrelevant.There was for example Amanda the Dog Mistress, with an astonishing tact and understanding of dogs, who could explain dogs and the cock of their ears and the droop of their tails and their vanity and their fidelity, and why they looked up and why they suddenly went off round the corner, and their pride in the sound of their voices and their dastardly thoughts and sniffing satisfactions, so that for the first time dogs had souls for Benham to see.And there was an Amanda with a striking passion for the sleekness and soft noses of horses.And there was an Amanda extremely garrulous, who was a biographical dictionary and critical handbook to all the girls in the school she had attended at Chichester--they seemed a very girlish lot of girls; and an Amanda who was very knowing--knowing was the only word for it--about pictures and architecture.And these and all the other Amandas agreed together to develop and share this one quality in common, that altogether they pointed to no end, they converged on nothing.

She was, it grew more and more apparent, a miscellany bound in a body.She was an animated discursiveness.That passion to get all things together into one aristocratic aim, that restraint of purpose, that imperative to focus, which was the structural essential of Benham's spirit, was altogether foreign to her composition.

There were so many Amandas, they were as innumerable as the Venuses--Cytherea, Cypria, Paphia, Popularia, Euploea, Area, Verticordia, Etaira, Basilea, Myrtea, Libertina, Freya, Astarte, Philommedis, Telessigamma, Anadyomene, and a thousand others to whom men have bowed and built temples, a thousand and the same, and yet it seemed to Benham there was still one wanting.

The Amanda he had loved most wonderfully was that Amanda in armour who had walked with him through the wilderness of the world along the road to Chichester--and that Amanda came back to him no more.

5

Amanda too was making her observations and discoveries.

These moods of his perplexed her; she was astonished to find he was becoming irritable; she felt that he needed a firm but gentle discipline in his deportment as a lover.At first he had been perfect....

But Amanda was more prepared for human inconsecutiveness than Benham, because she herself was inconsecutive, and her dissatisfaction with his irritations and preoccupation broadened to no general discontent.He had seemed perfect and he wasn't.So nothing was perfect.And he had to be managed, just as one must manage a dog or a cousin or a mother or a horse.Anyhow she had got him, she had no doubt that she held him by a thousand ties, the spotless leopard had him between her teeth, he was a prisoner in the dusk of her hair, and the world was all one vast promise of entertainment.

6

But the raid into the Balkans was not the tremendous success she had expected it to be.They had adventures, but they were not the richly coloured, mediaeval affairs she had anticipated.For the most part until Benham broke loose beyond Ochrida they were adventures in discomfort.In those remote parts of Europe inns die away and cease, and it had never occurred to Amanda that inns could die away anywhere.She had thought that they just became very simple and natural and quaint.And she had thought that when benighted people knocked at a door it would presently open hospitably.She had not expected shots at random from the window.

And it is not usual in Albania generally for women, whether they are Christian or Moslem, to go about unveiled; when they do so it leads to singular manifestations.The moral sense of the men is shocked and staggered, and they show it in many homely ways.Small boys at that age when feminine beauty does not yet prevail with them, pelt.

Also in Mahometan districts they pelt men who do not wear fezzes, while occasionally Christians of the shawl-headed or skull-cap persuasions will pelt a fez.Sketching is always a peltable or mobable offence, as being contrary to the Koran, and sitting down tempts the pelter.Generally they pelt.The dogs of Albania are numerous, big, dirty, white dogs, large and hostile, and they attack with little hesitation.The women of Albania are secluded and remote, and indisposed to be of service to an alien sister.Roads are infrequent and most bridges have broken down.No bridge has been repaired since the later seventeenth century, and no new bridge has been made since the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.There are no shops at all.The scenery is magnificent but precipitous, and many of the high roads are difficult to trace.And there is rain.In Albania there is sometimes very heavy rain.

Yet in spite of these drawbacks they spent some splendid hours in their exploration of that wild lost country beyond the Adriatic headlands.There was the approach to Cattaro for example, through an arm of the sea, amazingly beautiful on either shore, that wound its way into the wild mountains and ended in a deep blue bay under the tremendous declivity of Montenegro.The quay, with its trees and lateen craft, ran along under the towers and portcullised gate of the old Venetian wall, within clustered the town, and then the fortifications zigzagged up steeply to a monstrous fantastic fortress perched upon a great mountain headland that overhung the town.Behind it the rocks, slashed to and fro with the road to Cettinje, continued to ascend into blue haze, upward and upward until they became a purple curtain that filled half the heavens.