"But how closely," cried White, in a mood of cultivated enthusiasm;"how closely must all the poor little stories that we tell to-day follow in the footsteps of the Great Exemplars! A little while ago and the springtime freshness of Tobias irradiated the page.Now see! it is Christian--."Indeed it looked extremely like Christian as Benham went up across the springy turf from Epsom Downs station towards the crest of the hill.Was he not also fleeing in the morning sunlight from the City of Destruction? Was he not also seeking that better city whose name is Peace? And there was a bundle on his back.It was the bundle, Ithink, that seized most firmly upon the too literary imagination of White.
But the analogy of the bundle was a superficial one.Benham had not the slightest desire to lose it from his shoulders.It would have inconvenienced him very greatly if he had done so.It did not contain his sins.Our sins nowadays are not so easily separated.
It contained a light, warm cape-coat he had bought in Switzerland and which he intended to wrap about him when he slept under the stars, and in addition Merkle had packed it with his silk pyjamas, an extra pair of stockings, tooth-brush, brush and comb, a safety razor....And there were several sheets of the Ordnance map.
12
The urgency of getting away from something dominated Benham to the exclusion of any thought of what he might be getting to.That muddle of his London life had to be left behind.First, escape...
.
Over the downs great numbers of larks were singing.It was warm April that year and early.All the cloud stuff in the sky was gathered into great towering slow-sailing masses, and the rest was blue of the intensest.The air was so clean that Benham felt it clean in the substance of his body.The chestnuts down the hill to the right were flowering, the beeches were luminously green, and the oaks in the valley foaming gold.And sometimes it was one lark filled his ears, and sometimes he seemed to be hearing all the larks for miles about him.Presently over the crest he would be out of sight of the grand stand and the men exercising horses, and that brace of red-jacketed golfers....
What was he to do?
For a time he could think of nothing to do except to keep up and out of the valley.His whole being seemed to have come to his surfaces to look out at the budding of the year and hear the noise of the birds.And then he got into a long road from which he had to escape, and trespassing southward through plantations he reached the steep edge of the hills and sat down over above a great chalk pit somewhere near Dorking and surveyed all the tumbled wooded spaces of the Weald....It is after all not so great a country this Sussex, nor so hilly, from deepest valley to highest crest is not six hundred feet, yet what a greatness of effect it can achieve!
There is something in those downland views which, like sea views, lifts a mind out to the skies.All England it seemed was there to Benham's vision, and the purpose of the English, and his own purpose in the world.For a long time he surveyed the large delicacy of the detail before him, the crests, the tree-protected houses, the fields and farmsteads, the distant gleams of water.And then he became interested in the men who were working in the chalk pit down below.
They at any rate were not troubled with the problem of what to do with their lives.
13
Benham found his mind was now running clear, and so abundantly that he could scarcely, he felt, keep pace with it.As he thought his flow of ideas was tinged with a fear that he might forget what he was thinking.In an instant, for the first time in his mental existence, he could have imagined he had discovered Labour and seen it plain.A little while ago and he had seemed a lonely man among the hills, but indeed he was not lonely, these men had been with him all the time, and he was free to wander, to sit here, to think and choose simply because those men down there were not free.HE WASSPENDING THEIR LEISURE....Not once but many times with Prothero had he used the phrase RICHESSE OBLIGE.Now he remembered it.He began to remember a mass of ideas that had been overlaid and stifling within him.This was what Merkle and the club servants and the entertainments and engagements and his mother and the artistic touts and the theatrical touts and the hunting and the elaboration of games and--Mrs.Skelmersdale and all that had clustered thickly round him in London had been hiding from him.Those men below there had not been trusted to choose their work; they had been given it.
And he had been trusted....
And now to grapple with it! Now to get it clear! What work was he going to do? That settled, he would deal with his distractions readily enough.Until that was settled he was lax and exposed to every passing breeze of invitation.
"What work am I going to do? What work am I going to do?" He repeated it.
It is the only question for the aristocrat.What amusement? That for a footman on holiday.That for a silly child, for any creature that is kept or led or driven.That perhaps for a tired invalid, for a toiler worked to a rag.But able-bodied amusement! The arms of Mrs.Skelmersdale were no worse than the solemn aimlessness of hunting, and an evening of dalliance not an atom more reprehensible than an evening of chatter.It was the waste of him that made the sin.His life in London had been of a piece together.It was well that his intrigue had set a light on it, put a point to it, given him this saving crisis of the nerves.That, indeed, is the chief superiority of idle love-making over other more prevalent forms of idleness and self-indulgence; it does at least bear its proper label.It is reprehensible.It brings your careless honour to the challenge of concealment and shabby evasions and lies....
But in this pellucid air things took their proper proportions again.
And now what was he to do?
"Politics," he said aloud to the turf and the sky.
Is there any other work for an aristocratic man?...Science?
