"This spring, Benham, I tell you, is driving me mad.It is a peculiarly erotic spring.I cannot sleep, I cannot fix my mind, Icannot attend to ordinary conversation.These feelings, Iunderstand, are by no means peculiar to myself....No, don't interrupt me, Benham; let me talk now that the spirit of speech is upon me.When you came in you said, ‘How are you?' I am telling you how I am.You brought it on yourself.Well--I am--inflamed.Ihave no strong moral or religious convictions to assist me either to endure or deny this--this urgency.And so why should I deny it?
It's one of our chief problems here.The majority of my fellow dons who look at me with secretive faces in hall and court and combination-room are in just the same case as myself.The fever in oneself detects the fever in others.I know their hidden thoughts.
Their fishy eyes defy me to challenge their hidden thoughts.Each covers his miserable secret under the cloak of a wholesome manly indifference.A tattered cloak....Each tries to hide his abandonment to this horrible vice of continence--""Billy, what's the matter with you?"
Prothero grimaced impatience."Shall I NEVER teach you not to be a humbug, Benham?" he screamed, and in screaming became calmer.
"Nature taunts me, maddens me.My life is becoming a hell of shame.
‘Get out from all these books,' says Nature, ‘and serve the Flesh.'
The Flesh, Benham.Yes--I insist--the Flesh.Do I look like a pure spirit? Is any man a pure spirit? And here am I at Cambridge like a lark in a cage, with too much port and no Aspasia.Not that Ishould have liked Aspasia."
"Mutual, perhaps, Billy."
"Oh! you can sneer!"
"Well, clearly--Saint Paul is my authority--it's marriage, Billy."Prothero had walked to the window.He turned round.
"I CAN'T marry," he said."The trouble has gone too far.I've lost my nerve in the presence of women.I don't like them any more.
They come at one--done up in a lot of ridiculous clothes, and chattering about all sorts of things that don't matter....He surveyed his friend's thoughtful attitude."I'm getting to hate women, Benham.I'm beginning now to understand the bitterness of spinsters against men.I'm beginning to grasp the unkindliness of priests.The perpetual denial.To you, happily married, a woman is just a human being.You can talk to her, like her, you can even admire her calmly; you've got, you see, no grudge against her...."He sat down abruptly.
Benham, upon the hearthrug before the empty fireplace, considered him.
"Billy! this is delusion," he said."What's come over you?""I'm telling you," said Prothero.
"No," said Benham.
Prothero awaited some further utterance.
"I'm looking for the cause of it.It's feeding, Billy.It's port and stimulants where there is no scope for action.It's idleness.
I begin to see now how much fatter you are, how much coarser.""Idleness! Look at this pile of examination answers.Look at that filing system like an arsenal of wisdom.Useless wisdom, I admit, but anyhow not idleness.""There's still bodily idleness.No.That's your trouble.You're stuffy.You've enlarged your liver.You sit in this room of a warm morning after an extravagant breakfast--.And peep and covet.""Just eggs and bacon!"
"Think of it! Coffee and toast it ought to be.Come out of it, Billy, and get aired.""How can one?"
"Easily.Come out of it now.Come for a walk, you Pig!""It's an infernally warm morning.
"Walk with me to Grantchester."
"We might go by boat.You could row."
"WALK."
"I ought to do these papers."
"You weren't doing them."
"No...."
"Walk with me to Grantchester.All this affliction of yours is--horrid--and just nothing at all.Come out of it! I want you to come with me to Russia and about the world.I'm going to leave my wife--""Leave your wife!"
"Why not? And I came here hoping to find you clear-headed, and instead you are in this disgusting state.I've never met anything in my life so hot and red and shiny and shameless.Come out of it, man! How can one talk to you?"10
"You pull things down to your own level," said Benham as they went through the heat to Grantchester.
"I pull them down to truth," panted Prothero.
"Truth! As though being full of gross appetites was truth, and discipline and training some sort of falsity!""Artificiality.And begetting pride, Benham, begetting a prig's pride."For a time there was more than the heat of the day between them....
The things that Benham had come down to discuss were thrust into the background by the impassioned materialism of Prothero.
"I'm not talking of Love," he said, remaining persistently outrageous."I'm talking of physical needs.That first.What is the good of arranging systems of morality and sentiment before you know what is physically possible....
"But how can one disentangle physical and moral necessities?""Then why don't we up and find out?" said Billy.
He had no patience with the secrecy, the ignorance, the emotion that surrounded these questions.We didn't worship our ancestors when it came to building bridges or working metals or curing disease or studying our indigestion, and why should we become breathless or wordless with awe and terror when it came to this fundamental affair? Why here in particular should we give way to Holy Fear and stifled submission to traditional suppressions and the wisdom of the ages? "What is the wisdom of the ages?" said Prothero."Think of the corners where that wisdom was born....Flea-bitten sages in stone-age hovels....Wandering wise man with a rolling eye, a fakir under a tree, a Jewish sheik, an Arab epileptic....""Would you sweep away the experience of mankind?" protested Benham.
The experience of mankind in these matters had always been bitter experience.Most of it was better forgotten.It didn't convince.
