For some moments he stared at her, trying to get back to their point of divergence.
"Why?" he asked at length.
"We must have a house," she said.
He looked at her face. Her expression was profoundly thoughtful, her eyes were fixed on the slumbering ships poised upon the transparent water under the mountain shadows.
"You see," she thought it out, "you've got to TELL in London. You can't just sneak back there. You've got to strike a note of your own. With all these things of yours."
"But how?"
"There's a sort of little house, I used to see them when I was a girl and my father lived in London, about Brook Street and that part. Not too far north.... You see going back to London for us is just another adventure. We've got to capture London. We've got to scale it. We've got advantages of all sorts. But at present we're outside. We've got to march in."
Her clear hazel eyes contemplated conflicts and triumphs.
She was roused by Benham's voice.
"What the deuce are you thinking of, Amanda?"
She turned her level eyes to his. "London," she said. "For you."
"I don't want London," he said.
"I thought you did. You ought to. I do."
"But to take a house! Make an invasion of London!"
"You dear old Cheetah, you can't be always frisking about in the wilderness, staring at the stars."
"But I'm not going back to live in London in the old way, theatres, dinner-parties, chatter—"
"Oh no! We aren't going to do that sort of thing. We aren't going to join the ruck. We'll go about in holiday times all over the world. I want to see Fusiyama. I mean to swim in the South Seas. With you. We'll dodge the sharks. But all the same we shall have to have a house in London. We have to be FELT there."
She met his consternation fairly. She lifted her fine eyebrows. Her little face conveyed a protesting reasonableness.
"Well, MUSTN'T we?"
She added, "If we want to alter the world we ought to live in the world."
Since last they had disputed the question she had thought out these new phrases.
"Amanda," he said, "I think sometimes you haven't the remotest idea of what I am after. I don't believe you begin to suspect what I am up to."
She put her elbows on her knees, dropped her chin between her hands and regarded him impudently. She had a characteristic trick of looking up with her face downcast that never failed to soften his regard.
"Look here, Cheetah, don't you give way to your early morning habit of calling your own true love a fool," she said.
"Simply I tell you I will not go back to London."
"You will go back with me, Cheetah."
"I will go back as far as my work calls me there."
"It calls you through the voice of your mate and slave and doormat to just exactly the sort of house you ought to have.... It is the privilege and duty of the female to choose the lair."
For a space Benham made no reply. This controversy had been gathering for some time and he wanted to state his view as vividly as possible. The Benham style of connubial conversation had long since decided for emphasis rather than delicacy.
"I think," he said slowly, "that this wanting to take London by storm is a beastly VULGAR thing to want to do."
Amanda compressed her lips.
"I want to work out things in my mind," he went on. "I do not want to be distracted by social things, and I do not want to be distracted by picturesque things. This life—it's all very well on the surface, but it isn't real. I'm not getting hold of reality. Things slip away from me. God! but how they slip away from me!"
He got up and walked to the side of the boat.
She surveyed his back for some moments. Then she went and leant over the rail beside him.
"I want to go to London," she said.
"I don't."
"Where do you want to go?"
"Where I can see into the things that hold the world together."
"I have loved this wandering—I could wander always. But... Cheetah! I tell you I WANT to go to London."
He looked over his shoulder into her warm face. "NO," he said.
"But, I ask you."
He shook his head.
She put her face closer and whispered. "Cheetah! big beast of my heart. Do you hear your mate asking for something?"
He turned his eyes back to the mountains. "I must go my own way."
"Haven't I, so far, invented things, made life amusing, Cheetah? Can't you trust the leopard's wisdom?"
He stared at the coast inexorably.
"I wonder," she whispered.
"What?"
"You ARE that, Cheetah, that lank, long, EAGER beast—."
Suddenly with a nimble hand she had unbuttoned and rolled up the sleeve of her blouse. She stuck her pretty blue-veined arm before his eyes. "Look here, sir, it was you, wasn't it? It was your powerful jaw inflicted this bite upon the arm of a defenceless young leopardess—"
"Amanda!"
"Well." She wrinkled her brows.
He turned about and stood over her, he shook a finger in her face and there was a restrained intensity in his voice as he spoke.
"Look here, Amanda!" he said, "if you think that you are going to make me agree to any sort of project about London, to any sort of complication of our lives with houses in smart streets and a campaign of social assertion—by THAT, then may I be damned for an uxorious fool!"
Her eyes met his and there was mockery in her eyes.
"This, Cheetah, is the morning mood," she remarked.
"This is the essential mood. Listen, Amanda—"
He stopped short. He looked towards the gangway, they both looked. The magic word "Breakfast" came simultaneously from them.
"Eggs," she said ravenously, and led the way.
A smell of coffee as insistent as an herald's trumpet had called a truce between them.
3
Their marriage had been a comparatively inconspicuous one, but since that time they had been engaged upon a honeymoon of great extent and variety. Their wedding had taken place at South Harting church in the marked absence of Lady Marayne, and it had been marred by only one untoward event. The Reverend Amos Pugh who, in spite of the earnest advice of several friends had insisted upon sharing in the ceremony, had suddenly covered his face with the sleeves of his surplice and fled with a swift rustle to the vestry, whence an uproar of inadequately smothered sorrow came as an obligato accompaniment to the more crucial passages of the service. Amanda appeared unaware of the incident at the time, but afterwards she explained things to Benham. "Curates," she said, "are such pent-up men. One ought, I suppose, to remember that. But he never had anything to go upon at all—not anything—except his own imaginations."
"I suppose when you met him you were nice to him."
"I was nice to him, of course...."
They drove away from Harting, as it were, over the weeping remains of this infatuated divine. His sorrow made them thoughtful for a time, and then Amanda nestled closer to her lover and they forgot about him, and their honeymoon became so active and entertaining that only very rarely and transitorily did they ever think of him again.
The original conception of their honeymoon had been identical with the plans Benham had made for the survey and study of the world, and it was through a series of modifications, replacements and additions that it became at last a prolonged and very picturesque tour in Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, North Italy, and down the Adriatic coast. Amanda had never seen mountains, and longed, she said, to climb. This took them first to Switzerland. Then, in spite of their exalted aims, the devotion of their lives to noble purposes, it was evident that Amanda had no intention of scamping the detail of love, and for that what background is so richly beautiful as Italy? An important aspect of the grand tour round the world as Benham had planned it, had been interviews, inquiries and conversations with every sort of representative and understanding person he could reach. An unembarrassed young man who wants to know and does not promise to bore may reach almost any one in that way, he is as impersonal as pure reason and as mobile as a letter, but the presence of a lady in his train leaves him no longer unembarrassed. His approach has become a social event. The wife of a great or significant personage must take notice or decide not to take notice. Of course Amanda was prepared to go anywhere, just as Benham's shadow; it was the world that was unprepared. And a second leading aspect of his original scheme had been the examination of the ways of government in cities and the shifting and mixture of nations and races. It would have led to back streets, and involved and complicated details, and there was something in the fine flame of girlhood beside him that he felt was incompatible with those shadows and that dust. And also they were lovers and very deeply in love. It was amazing how swiftly that draggled shameful London sparrow-gamin, Eros, took heart from Amanda, and became wonderful, beautiful, glowing, life-giving, confident, clear-eyed; how he changed from flesh to sweet fire, and grew until he filled the sky. So that you see they went to Switzerland and Italy at last very like two ordinary young people who were not aristocrats at all, had no theory about the world or their destiny, but were simply just ardently delighted with the discovery of one another.