"But still, don't you think—..."
It is unnecessary even to recapitulate these universal controversies of our time. The lunch-table and the dinner-table and the general talk of the house drifted more and more definitely at its own level in the same direction as the private talk of Prothero and Benham, towards the antagonism of the privileged few and the many, of the trained and traditioned against the natural and undisciplined, of aristocracy against democracy. At the week-end Sir Godfrey returned to bring fresh elements. He said that democracy was unscientific. "To deny aristocracy is to deny the existence of the fittest. It is on the existence of the fittest that progress depends."
"But do our social conditions exalt the fittest?" asked Prothero.
"That is another question," said Benham.
"Exactly," said Sir Godfrey. "That is another question. But speaking with some special knowledge, I should say that on the whole the people who are on the top of things OUGHT to be on the top of things. I agree with Aristotle that there is such a thing as a natural inferior."
"So far as I can understand Mr. Prothero," said Lady Marayne, "he thinks that all the inferiors are the superiors and all the superiors inferior. It's quite simple...."
It made Prothero none the less indignant with this, that there was indeed a grain of truth in it. He hated superiors, he felt for inferiors.
10
At last came the hour of tipping. An embarrassed and miserable Prothero went slinking about the house distributing unexpected gold.
It was stupid, it was damnable; he had had to borrow the money from his mother....
Lady Marayne felt he had escaped her. The controversy that should have split these two young men apart had given them a new interest in each other. When afterwards she sounded her son, very delicately, to see if indeed he was aware of the clumsiness, the social ignorance and uneasiness, the complete unsuitability of his friend, she could get no more from him than that exasperating phrase, "He has ideas!"
What are ideas? England may yet be ruined by ideas.
He ought never to have gone to Trinity, that monster packet of everything. He ought to have gone to some little GOOD college, good all through. She ought to have asked some one who KNEW.
11
One glowing afternoon in October, as these two young men came over Magdalen Bridge after a long disputatious and rather tiring walk to Drayton—they had been talking of Eugenics and the "family"—Benham was almost knocked down by an American trotter driven by Lord Breeze. "Whup there!" said Lord Breeze in a voice deliberately brutal, and Benham, roused from that abstraction which is partly fatigue, had to jump aside and stumbled against the parapet as the gaunt pacer went pounding by.
Lord Breeze grinned the sort of grin a man remembers. And passed.
"Damnation!" said Benham with a face that had become suddenly very white.
Then presently. "Any fool can do that who cares to go to the trouble."
"That," said Prothero, taking up their unquenchable issue, "that is the feeling of democracy."
"I walk because I choose to," said Benham.
The thing rankled.
"This equestrianism," he began, "is a matter of time and money—time even more than money. I want to read. I want to deal with ideas....
"Any fool can drive...."
"Exactly," said Prothero.
"As for riding, it means no more than the elaborate study and cultivation of your horse. You have to know him. All horses are individuals. A made horse perhaps goes its round like an omnibus, but for the rest...."
Prothero made a noise of sympathetic assent.
"In a country where equestrianism is assertion I suppose one must be equestrian...."
That night some malignant spirit kept Benham awake, and great American trotters with vast wide-striding feet and long yellow teeth, uncontrollable, hard-mouthed American trotters, pounded over his angry soul.
"Prothero," he said in hall next day, "we are going to drive to-morrow."
Next day, so soon as they had lunched, he led the way towards Maltby's, in Crosshampton Lane. Something in his bearing put a question into Prothero's mind. "Benham," he asked, "have you ever driven before?"
"NEVER," said Benham.
"Well?"
"I'm going to now."
Something between pleasure and alarm came into Prothero's eyes. He quickened his pace so as to get alongside his friend and scrutinize his pale determination. "Why are you doing this?" he asked.
"I want to do it."
"Benham, is it—EQUESTRIAN?"
Benham made no audible reply. They proceeded resolutely in silence.
An air of expectation prevailed in Maltby's yard. In the shafts of a high, bleak-looking vehicle with vast side wheels, a throne-like vehicle that impressed Billy Prothero as being a gig, a very large angular black horse was being harnessed.
"This is mine," said Benham compactly.
"This is yours, sir," said an ostler.
"He looks—QUIET."
"You'll find him fresh enough, sir."
Benham made a complicated ascent to the driver's seat and was handed the reins. "Come on," he said, and Prothero followed to a less exalted seat at Benham's side. They seemed to be at a very great height indeed. The horse was then led out into Crosshampton Lane, faced towards Trinity Street and discharged. "Check," said Benham, and touched the steed with his whip. They started quite well, and the ostlers went back into the yard, visibly unanxious. It struck Prothero that perhaps driving was less difficult than he had supposed.
They went along Crosshampton Lane, that high-walled gulley, with dignity, with only a slight suggestion of the inaccuracy that was presently to become apparent, until they met a little old bearded don on a bicycle. Then some misunderstanding arose between Benham and the horse, and the little bearded don was driven into the narrow pavement and had to get off hastily. He made no comment, but his face became like a gargoyle. "Sorry," said Benham, and gave his mind to the corner. There was some difficulty about whether they were to turn to the right or the left, but at last Benham, it seemed, carried his point, and they went along the narrow street, past the grey splendours of King's, and rather in the middle of the way.
Prothero considered the beast in front of him, and how proud and disrespectful a horse in a dogcart can seem to those behind it! Moreover, unaccustomed as he was to horses, he was struck by the strong resemblance a bird's-eye view of a horse bears to a fiddle, a fiddle with devil's ears.
"Of course," said Prothero, "this isn't a trotter."
"I couldn't get a trotter," said Benham.
"I thought I would try this sort of thing before I tried a trotter," he added.
And then suddenly came disaster.
There was a butcher's cart on the right, and Benham, mistrusting the intelligence of his steed, insisted upon an excessive amplitude of clearance. He did not reckon with the hand-barrow on his left, piled up with dirty plates from the lunch of Trinity Hall. It had been left there; its custodian was away upon some mysterious errand. Heaven knows why Trinity Hall exhibited the treasures of its crockery thus stained and deified in the Cambridge streets. But it did—for Benham's and Prothero's undoing. Prothero saw the great wheel over which he was poised entangle itself with the little wheel of the barrow. "God!" he whispered, and craned, fascinated. The little wheel was manifestly intrigued beyond all self-control by the great wheel; it clung to it, it went before it, heedless of the barrow, of which it was an inseparable part. The barrow came about with an appearance of unwillingness, it locked against the great wheel; it reared itself towards Prothero and began, smash, smash, smash, to shed its higher plates. It was clear that Benham was grappling with a crisis upon a basis of inadequate experience. A number of people shouted haphazard things. Then, too late, the barrow had persuaded the little wheel to give up its fancy for the great wheel, and there was an enormous crash.