"You must make good friends," she said. "Isn't young Lord Breeze at your college? His mother the other day told me he was. And Sir Freddy Quenton's boy. And there are both the young Baptons at Cambridge."
He knew one of the Baptons.
"Poff," she said suddenly, "has it ever occurred to you what you are going to do afterwards. Do you know you are going to be quite well off?"
Benham looked up with a faint embarrassment. "My father said something. He was rather vague. It wasn't his affair—that kind of thing."
"You will be quite well off," she repeated, without any complicating particulars. "You will be so well off that it will be possible for you to do anything almost that you like in the world. Nothing will tie you. Nothing...."
"But—HOW well off?"
"You will have several thousands a year."
"Thousands?"
"Yes. Why not?"
"But—Mother, this is rather astounding.... Does this mean there are estates somewhere, responsibilities?"
"It is just money. Investments."
"You know, I've imagined—. I've thought always I should have to DO something."
"You MUST do something, Poff. But it needn't be for a living. The world is yours without that. And so you see you've got to make plans. You've got to know the sort of people who'll have things in their hands. You've got to keep out of—holes and corners. You've got to think of Parliament and abroad. There's the army, there's diplomacy. There's the Empire. You can be a Cecil Rhodes if you like. You can be a Winston...."
5
Perhaps it was only the innate eagerness of Lady Marayne which made her feel disappointed in her son's outlook upon life. He did not choose among his glittering possibilities, he did not say what he was going to be, proconsul, ambassador, statesman, for days. And he talked VAGUELY of wanting to do something fine, but all in a fog. A boy of nearly nineteen ought to have at least the beginnings of SAVOIR FAIRE.
Was he in the right set? Was he indeed in the right college? Trinity, by his account, seemed a huge featureless place—and might he not conceivably be LOST in it? In those big crowds one had to insist upon oneself. Poff never insisted upon himself—except quite at the wrong moment. And there was this Billy Prothero. BILLY! Like a goat or something. People called William don't get their Christian name insisted upon unless they are vulnerable somewhere. Any form of William stamps a weakness, Willie, Willy, Will, Billy, Bill; it's a fearful handle for one's friends. At any rate Poff had escaped that. But this Prothero!
"But who IS this Billy Prothero?" she asked one evening in the walled garden.
"He was at Minchinghampton."
"But who IS he? Who is his father? Where does he come from?"
Benham sought in his mind for a space. "I don't know," he said at last. Billy had always been rather reticent about his people. She demanded descriptions. She demanded an account of Billy's furniture, Billy's clothes, Billy's form of exercise. It dawned upon Benham that for some inexplicable reason she was hostile to Billy. It was like the unmasking of an ambuscade. He had talked a lot about Prothero's ideas and the discussions of social reform and social service that went on in his rooms, for Billy read at unknown times, and was open at all hours to any argumentative caller. To Lady Marayne all ideas were obnoxious, a form of fogging; all ideas, she held, were queer ideas. "And does he call himself a Socialist?" she asked. "I THOUGHT he would."
"Poff," she cried suddenly, "you're not a SOCIALIST?"
"Such a vague term."
"But these friends of yours—they seem to be ALL Socialists. Red ties and everything complete."
"They have ideas," he evaded. He tried to express it better. "They give one something to take hold of."
She sat up stiffly on the garden-seat. She lifted her finger at him, very seriously. "I hope," she said with all her heart, "that you will have nothing to do with such ideas. Nothing. SOCIALISM!"
"They make a case."
"Pooh! Any one can make a case."
"But—"
"There's no sense in them. What is the good of talking about upsetting everything? Just disorder. How can one do anything then? You mustn't. You mustn't. No. It's nonsense, little Poff. It's absurd. And you may spoil so much.... I HATE the way you talk of it.... As if it wasn't all—absolutely—RUBBISH...."
She was earnest almost to the intonation of tears.
Why couldn't her son go straight for his ends, clear tangible ends, as she had always done? This thinking about everything! She had never thought about anything in all her life for more than half an hour—and it had always turned out remarkably well.
Benham felt baffled. There was a pause. How on earth could he go on telling her his ideas if this was how they were to be taken?
"I wish sometimes," his mother said abruptly, with an unusually sharp note in her voice, "that you wouldn't look quite so like your father."
"But I'm NOT like my father!" said Benham puzzled.
"No," she insisted, and with an air of appealing to his soberer reason, "so why should you go LOOKING like him? That CONCERNED expression...."
She jumped to her feet. "Poff," she said, "I want to go and see the evening primroses pop. You and I are talking nonsense. THEY don't have ideas anyhow. They just pop—as God meant them to do. What stupid things we human beings are!"
Her philosophical moments were perhaps the most baffling of all.
6
Billy Prothero became the symbol in the mind of Lady Marayne for all that disappointed her in Benham. He had to become the symbol, because she could not think of complicated or abstract things, she had to make things personal, and he was the only personality available. She fretted over his existence for some days therefore (once she awakened and thought about him in the night), and then suddenly she determined to grasp her nettle. She decided to seize and obliterate this Prothero. He must come to Chexington and be thoroughly and conclusively led on, examined, ransacked, shown up, and disposed of for ever. At once. She was not quite clear how she meant to do this, but she was quite resolved that it had to be done. Anything is better than inaction.
There was a little difficulty about dates and engagements, but he came, and through the season of expectation Benham, who was now for the first time in contact with the feminine nature, was delighted at the apparent change to cordiality. So that he talked of Billy to his mother much more than he had ever done before.
Billy had been his particular friend at Minchinghampton, at least during the closing two years of his school life. Billy had fallen into friendship with Benham, as some of us fall in love, quite suddenly, when he saw Benham get down from the fence and be sick after his encounter with the bull. Already Billy was excited by admiration, but it was the incongruity of the sickness conquered him. He went back to the school with his hands more than usually in his pockets, and no eyes for anything but this remarkable strung-up fellow-creature. He felt he had never observed Benham before, and he was astonished that he had not done so.
Billy Prothero was a sturdy sort of boy, generously wanting in good looks. His hair was rough, and his complexion muddy, and he walked about with his hands in his pockets, long flexible lips protruded in a whistle, and a rather shapeless nose well up to show he didn't care. Providence had sought to console him by giving him a keen eye for the absurdity of other people. He had a suggestive tongue, and he professed and practised cowardice to the scandal of all his acquaintances. He was said never to wash behind his ears, but this report wronged him. There had been a time when he did not do so, but his mother had won him to a promise, and now that operation was often the sum of his simple hasty toilet. His desire to associate himself with Benham was so strong that it triumphed over a defensive reserve. It enabled him to detect accessible moments, do inobtrusive friendly services, and above all amuse his quarry. He not only amused Benham, he stimulated him. They came to do quite a number of things together. In the language of schoolboy stories they became "inseparables."