“There is far more freedom for the personal life in Russia than in England,” said Prothero, a little irrelevantly.

Benham went on with his discourse about Russia. . . .

“At the college of Troitzka,” said Prothero, “which I understand is a kind of monster Trinity unencumbered by a University, Binns tells me that although there is a profession of celibacy within the walls, the arrangements of the town and more particularly of the various hotels are conceived in a spirit of extreme liberality.”

Benham hardly attended at all to these interruptions.

He went on to point out the elemental quality of the Russian situation.  He led up to the assertion that to go to Russia, to see Russia, to try to grasp the broad outline of the Russian process, was the manifest duty of every responsible intelligence that was free to do as much.  And so he was going, and if Prothero cared to come too—­

“Yes,” said Prothero, “I should like to go to Russia.”

13

But throughout all their travel together that summer Benham was never able to lift Prothero away from his obsession.  It was the substance of their talk as the Holland boat stood out past waiting destroyers and winking beacons and the lights of Harwich, into the smoothly undulating darkness of the North Sea; it rose upon them again as they sat over the cakes and cheese of a Dutch breakfast in the express for Berlin.  Prothero filled the Sieges Allee with his complaints against nature and society, and distracted Benham in his contemplation of Polish agriculture from the windows of the train with turgid sexual liberalism.  So that Benham, during this period until Prothero left him and until the tragic enormous spectacle of Russia in revolution took complete possession of him, was as it were thinking upon two floors.  Upon the one he was thinking of the vast problems of a society of a hundred million people staggering on the verge of anarchy, and upon the other he was perplexed by the feverish inattention of Prothero to the tremendous things that were going on all about them.  It was only presently when the serenity of his own private life began to be ruffled by disillusionment, that he began to realize the intimate connexion of these two systems of thought.  Yet Prothero put it to him plainly enough.

“Inattentive,” said Prothero, “of course I am inattentive.  What is really the matter with all this—­this social mess people are in here, is that nearly everybody is inattentive.  These Big Things of yours, nobody is thinking of them really.  Everybody is thinking about the Near Things that concern himself.”

“The bombs they threw yesterday?  The Cossacks and the whips?”

“Nudges.  Gestures of inattention.  If everybody was thinking of the Res Publica would there be any need for bombs?”