第94章 CHAPTER THE SIXTH(2)

And again he wrote: "Man, I see, is an over-practical creature, too eager to get into action.There is our deepest trouble.He takes conclusions ready-made, or he makes themave been right enough.Pip was as good as gold until she undermined him....Awoman can't wait about like an umbrella in a stand....He was just a boy....Only of course there she was--a novelty.It is perfectly easy to understand.She flattered him....Men are such fools.""Still--it's no good saying that now."

"But she'll spend all your money, Poff! She'll break your back with debts.What's to prevent her? With him living on her! For that's what it comes to practically.""Well, what am I to do?"

"You aren't going back without tying her up, Poff? You ought to stop every farthing of her money--every farthing.It's your duty.""I can't do things like that."

"But have you no Shame? To let that sort of thing go on!""If I don't feel the Shame of it-- And I don't.""And that money--.I got you that money, Poff! It was my money."Benham stared at her perplexed."What am I to do?" he asked.

"Cut her off, you silly boy! Tie her up! Pay her through a solicitor.Say that if she sees him ONCE again--"He reflected."No," he said at last.

"Poff!" she cried, "every time I see you, you are more and more like your father.You're going off--just as he did.That baffled, MULISH look--priggish--solemn! Oh! it's strange the stuff a poor woman has to bring into the world.But you'll do nothing.I know you'll do nothing.You'll stand everything.You--you Cuckold! And she'll drive by me, she'll pass me in theatres with the money that ought to have been mine! Oh! Oh!"She dabbed her handkerchief from one swimming eye to the other.But she went on talking.Faster and faster, less and less coherently;more and more wildly abusive.Presently in a brief pause of the storm Benham sighed profoundly....

It brought the scene to a painful end....

For weeks her distress pursued and perplexed him.

He had an extraordinary persuasion that in some obscure way he was in default, that he was to blame for her distress, that he owed her--he could never define what he owed her.

And yet, what on earth was one to do?

And something his mother had said gave him the odd idea that he had misjudged his father, that he had missed depths of perplexed and kindred goodwill.He went down to see him before he returned to India.But if there was a hidden well of feeling in Mr.Benham senior, it had been very carefully boarded over.The parental mind and attention were entirely engaged in a dispute in the SCHOOL WORLDabout the heuristic method.Somebody had been disrespectnt of her and that his relations to her squared with any of his preconceptions of nobility, and yet at no precise point could he detect where he had definitely taken an ignoble step.Through Amanda he was coming to the full experience of life.Like all of us he had been prepared, he had prepared himself, to take life in a certain way, and life had taken him, as it takes all of us, in an entirely different and unexpected way....He had been ready for noble deeds and villainies, for achievements and failures, and here as the dominant fact of his personal life was a perplexing riddle.He could not hate and condemn her for ten minutes at a time without a flow of exoneration;he could not think of her tolerantly or lovingly without immediate shame and resentment, and with the utmost will in the world he could not banish her from his mind.

During the intervening years he had never ceased to have her in his mind; he would not think of her it is true if he could help it, but often he could not help it, and as a negative presence, as a thing denied, she was almost more potent than she had been as a thing accepted.Meanwhile he worked.His nervous irritability increased, but it did not hinder the steady development of his Research.

Long before his final parting from Amanda he had worked out his idea and method for all the more personal problems in life; the problems he put together under his headings of the first three "Limitations."He had resolved to emancipate himself from fear, indulgence, and that instinctive preoccupation with the interests and dignity of self which he chose to term Jealousy, and with the one tremendous exception of Amanda he had to a large extent succeeded.Amanda.

Amanda.Amanda.He stuck the more grimly to his Research to drown that beating in his brain.

Emancipation from all these personal things he held now to be a mere prelude to the real work of a man's life, which was to serve this dream of a larger human purpose.The bulk of his work was to discover and define that purpose, that purpose which must be the directing and comprehending form of all the activities of the noble life.One cannot be noble, he had come to perceive, at large; one must be noble to an end.To make human life, collectively and in detail, a thing more comprehensive, more beautiful, more generous and coherent than it is to-day seemed to him the fundamental intention of all nobility.He believed more and more firmly that the impulses to make and help and subserve great purposes are abundantly present in the world, that they are inhibited by hasty thinking, limited thinking and bad thinking, and that the real ennoblement of human life was not so much a creation as a release.

He lumped the preventive and destructive forces that keep men dispersed, unhappy, and ignoble under the heading of Prejudice, and he made this Prejudice his fourth and greatest and most difficult limitation.In one place he had written it, "Prejudice or Divisions." That being subdued in oneself and in the world, then in the measure of its subjugation, the new life of our race, the great age, the noble age, would begin.