“But a life with a large income MUST be sordid unless it makes some sort of attempt to be fine. …”
9
By transitions that were as natural as they were complicated and untraceable Prothero found his visit to Chexington developing into a tangle of discussions that all ultimately resolved themselves into an antagonism of the democratic and the aristocratic idea. And his part was, he found, to be the exponent of the democratic idea. The next day he came down early, his talk with Benham still running through his head, and after a turn or so in the garden he was attracted to the front door by a sound of voices, and found Lady Marayne had been up still earlier and was dismounting from a large effective black horse. This extorted an unwilling admiration from him. She greeted him very pleasantly and made a kind of introduction of her steed. There had been trouble at a gate, he was a young horse and fidgeted at gates; the dispute was still bright in her. Benham she declared was still in bed. “Wait till I have a mount for him.” She reappeared fitfully in the breakfast-room, and then he was left to Benham until just before lunch. They read and afterwards, as the summer day grew hot, they swam in the nude pond. She joined them in the water, splashing about in a costume of some elaboration and being very careful not to wet her hair. Then she came and sat with them on the seat under the big cedar and talked with them in a wrap that was pretty rather than prudish and entirely unmotherly. And she began a fresh attack upon him by asking him if he wasn't a Socialist and whether he didn't want to pull down Chexington and grow potatoes all over the park.
This struck Prothero as an inadequate statement of the Socialist project and he made an unsuccessful attempt to get it amended.
The engagement thus opened was renewed with great energy at lunch. Sir Godfrey had returned to London and the inmost aspect of his fellow-creatures, but the party of three was supplemented by a vague young lady from the village and an alert agent from the neighbouring Tentington estate who had intentions about a cottage. Lady Marayne insisted upon regarding Socialism as a proposal to reinaugurate the first French Revolution, as an inversion of society so that it would be bottom upward, as an attack upon rule, order, direction. “And what good are all these proposals? If you had the poor dear king beheaded, you'd only get a Napoleon. If you divided all the property up between everybody, you'd have rich and poor again in a year.”
Billy perceived no way of explaining away this version of his Socialism that would not involve uncivil contradictions—and nobody ever contradicted Lady Marayne.
“But, Lady Marayne, don't you think there is a lot of disorder and injustice in the world?” he protested.
“There would be ever so much more if your Socialists had their way.”
“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.