It was the Labour trouble in the Transvaal which had brought the two schoolfellows together again.White had been on his way to Zimbabwe.An emotional disturbance of unusual intensity had driven him to seek consolations in strange scenery and mysterious desolations.It was as if Zimbabwe called to him.Benham had come to South Africa to see into the question of Indian immigration, and he was now on his way to meet Amanda in London.Neither man had given much heed to the gathering social conflict on the Rand until the storm burst about them.There had been a few paragraphs in the papers about a dispute upon a point of labour etiquette, a question of the recognition of Trade Union officials, a thing that impressed them both as technical, and then suddenly a long incubated quarrel flared out in rioting and violence, the burning of houses and furniture, attacks on mines, attempts to dynamite trains.White stayed in Johannesburg because he did not want to be stranded up country by the railway strike that was among the possibilities of the situation.Benham stayed because he was going to London very reluctantly, and he was glad of this justification for a few days'
delay.The two men found themselves occupying adjacent tables in the Sherborough Hotel, and White was the first to recognize the other.They came together with a warmth and readiness of intimacy that neither would have displayed in London.
White had not seen Benham since the social days of Amanda at Lancaster Gate, and he was astonished at the change a few years had made in him.The peculiar contrast of his pallor and his dark hair had become more marked, his skin was deader, his features seemed more prominent and his expression intenser.His eyes were very bright and more sunken under his brows.He had suffered from yellow fever in the West Indies, and these it seemed were the marks left by that illness.And he was much more detached from the people about him; less attentive to the small incidents of life, more occupied with inner things.He greeted White with a confidence that White was one day to remember as pathetic.
"It is good to meet an old friend," Benham said."I have lost friends.And I do not make fresh ones.I go about too much by myself, and I do not follow the same tracks that other people are following...."What track was he following? It was now that White first heard of the Research Magnificent.He wanted to know what Benham was doing, and Benham after some partial and unsatisfactory explanation of his interest in insurgent Hindoos, embarked upon larger expositions.
"It is, of course, a part of something else," he amplified.He was writing a book, "an enormous sort of book." He laughed with a touch of shyness.It was about "everything," about how to live and how not to live.And "aristocracy, and all sorts of things." White was always curious about other people's books.Benham became earnest and more explicit under encouragement, and to talk about his book was soon to talk about himself.In various ways, intentionally and inadvertently, he told White much.These chance encounters, these intimacies of the train and hotel, will lead men at times to a stark frankness of statement they would never permit themselves with habitual friends.
About the Johannesburg labour trouble they talked very little, considering how insistent it was becoming.But the wide propositions of the Research Magnificent, with its large indifference to immediate occurrences, its vast patience, its tremendous expectations, contrasted very sharply in White's memory with the bitterness, narrowness and resentment of the events about them.For him the thought of that first discussion of this vast inchoate book into which Benham's life was flowering, and which he was ultimately to summarize, trailed with it a fringe of vivid little pictures; pictures of crowds of men hurrying on bicycles and afoot under a lowering twilight sky towards murmuring centres of disorder, of startling flares seen suddenly afar off, of the muffled galloping of troops through the broad dusty street in the night, of groups of men standing and watching down straight broad roads, roads that ended in groups of chimneys and squat buildings of corrugated iron.And once there was a marching body of white men in the foreground and a complicated wire fence, and a clustering mass of Kaffirs watching them over this fence and talking eagerly amongst themselves.
"All this affair here is little more than a hitch in the machinery,"said Benham, and went back to his large preoccupation....
But White, who had not seen so much human disorder as Benham, felt that it was more than that.Always he kept the tail of his eye upon that eventful background while Benham talked to him.
When the firearms went off he may for the moment have even given the background the greater share of his attention....
11
It was only as White burrowed through his legacy of documents that the full values came to very many things that Benham said during these last conversations.The papers fitted in with his memories of their long talks like text with commentary; so much of Benham's talk had repeated the private writings in which he had first digested his ideas that it was presently almost impossible to disentangle what had been said and understood at Johannesburg from the fuller statement of those patched and corrected manuscripts.The two things merged in White's mind as he read.The written text took upon itself a resonance of Benham's voice; it eked out the hints and broken sentences of his remembered conversation.
