"I'm going round the world," he told them simply. "I may be away for two years, and I thought I would like to see you all again before I started."
That was quite the way they did things.
The supper-party included Mr. Rathbone-Sanders, who displayed a curious tendency to drift in between Benham and Amanda, a literary youth with a Byronic visage, very dark curly hair, and a number of extraordinarily mature chins, a girl-friend of Betty's who had cycled down from London, and who it appeared maintained herself at large in London by drawing for advertisements, and a silent colourless friend of Mr. Rathbone-Sanders. The talk lit by Amanda's enthusiasm circled actively round Benham's expedition. It was clear that the idea of giving some years to thinking out one's possible work in the world was for some reason that remained obscure highly irritating to both Mr. Rathbone-Sanders and the Byronic youth. Betty too regarded it as levity when there was "so much to be done," and the topic whacked about and rose to something like a wrangle, and sat down and rested and got up again reinvigorated, with a continuity of interest that Benham had never yet encountered in any London gathering. He made a good case for his modern version of the Grand Tour, and he gave them something of his intellectual enthusiasm for the distances and views, the cities and seas, the multitudinous wide spectacle of the world he was to experience. He had been reading about Benares and North China. As he talked Amanda, who had been animated at first, fell thoughtful and silent. And then it was discovered that the night was wonderfully warm and the moon shining. They drifted out into the garden, but Mr. Rathbone-Sanders was suddenly entangled and drawn back by Mrs. Wilder and the young woman from London upon some technical point, and taken to the work-table in the corner of the dining-room to explain. He was never able to get to the garden.
Benham found himself with Amanda upon a side path, a little isolated by some swaggering artichokes and a couple of apple trees and so forth from the general conversation. They cut themselves off from the continuation of that by a little silence, and then she spoke abruptly and with the quickness of a speaker who has thought out something to say and fears interruption: "Why did you come down here?"
"I wanted to see you before I went."
"You disturb me. You fill me with envy."
"I didn't think of that. I wanted to see you again."
"And then you will go off round the world, you will see the Tropics, you will see India, you will go into Chinese cities all hung with vermilion, you will climb mountains. Oh! men can do all the splendid things. Why do you come here to remind me of it? I have never been anywhere, anywhere at all. I never shall go anywhere. Never in my life have I seen a mountain. Those Downs there—look at them!—are my highest. And while you are travelling I shall think of you—and think of you...."
"Would YOU like to travel?" he asked as though that was an extraordinary idea.
"Do you think EVERY girl wants to sit at home and rock a cradle?"
"I never thought YOU did."
"Then what did you think I wanted?"
"What DO you want?"
She held her arms out widely, and the moonlight shone in her eyes as she turned her face to him.
"Just what you want," she said; "—THE WHOLE WORLD!
"Life is like a feast," she went on; "it is spread before everybody and nobody must touch it. What am I? Just a prisoner. In a cottage garden. Looking for ever over a hedge. I should be happier if I couldn't look. I remember once, only a little time ago, there was a cheap excursion to London. Our only servant went. She had to get up at an unearthly hour, and I—I got up too. I helped her to get off. And when she was gone I went up to my bedroom again and cried. I cried with envy for any one, any one who could go away. I've been nowhere—except to school at Chichester and three or four times to Emsworth and Bognor—for eight years. When you go"—the tears glittered in the moonlight—"I shall cry. It will be worse than the excursion to London.... Ever since you were here before I've been thinking of it."
It seemed to Benham that here indeed was the very sister of his spirit. His words sprang into his mind as one thinks of a repartee. "But why shouldn't you come too?" he said.
She stared at him in silence. The two white-lit faces examined each other. Both she and Benham were trembling.
"COME TOO?" she repeated.
"Yes, with me."
"But—HOW?"
Then suddenly she was weeping like a child that is teased; her troubled eyes looked out from under puckered brows. "You don't mean it," she said. "You don't mean it."
And then indeed he meant it.
"Marry me," he said very quickly, glancing towards the dark group at the end of the garden. "And we will go together."
He seized her arm and drew her to him. "I love you," he said. "I love your spirit. You are not like any one else."
There was a moment's hesitation.
Both he and she looked to see how far they were still alone.
Then they turned their dusky faces to each other. He drew her still closer.
"Oh!" she said, and yielded herself to be kissed. Their lips touched, and for a moment he held her lithe body against his own.
"I want you," he whispered close to her. "You are my mate. From the first sight of you I knew that...."
They embraced—alertly furtive.
Then they stood a little apart. Some one was coming towards them. Amanda's bearing changed swiftly. She put up her little face to his, confidently and intimately.
"Don't TELL any one," she whispered eagerly shaking his arm to emphasize her words. "Don't tell any one—not yet. Not for a few days...."
She pushed him from her quickly as the shadowy form of Betty appeared in a little path between the artichokes and raspberry canes.
"Listening to the nightingales?" cried Betty.
"Yes, aren't they?" said Amanda inconsecutively.
"That's our very own nightingale!" cried Betty advancing. "Do you hear it, Mr. Benham? No, not that one. That is a quite inferior bird that performs in the vicarage trees...."
11
When a man has found and won his mate then the best traditions demand a lyrical interlude. It should be possible to tell, in that ecstatic manner which melts words into moonshine, makes prose almost uncomfortably rhythmic, and brings all the freshness of every spring that ever was across the page, of the joyous exaltation of the happy lover. This at any rate was what White had always done in his novels hitherto, and what he would certainly have done at this point had he had the telling of Benham's story uncontrolledly in his hands. But, indeed, indeed, in real life, in very truth, the heart has not this simplicity. Only the heroes of romance, and a few strong simple clean-shaven Americans have that much emotional integrity. (And even the Americans do at times seem to an observant eye to be putting in work at the job and keeping up their gladness.) Benham was excited that night, but not in the proper bright-eyed, red-cheeked way; he did not dance down the village street of Harting to his harbour at the Ship, and the expression in his eyes as he sat on the edge of his bed was not the deep elemental wonder one could have wished there, but amazement. Do not suppose that he did not love Amanda, that a rich majority of his being was not triumphantly glad to have won her, that the image of the two armour-clad lovers was not still striding and flourishing through the lit wilderness of his imagination. For three weeks things had pointed him to this. They would do everything together now, he and his mate, they would scale mountains together and ride side by side towards ruined cities across the deserts of the World. He could have wished no better thing. But at the same time, even as he felt and admitted this and rejoiced at it, the sky of his mind was black with consternation....